Cartels

This is another Seagal movie that doesn't have very much Seagal in it. Luke Goss plays the actual main character. Seagal does show up at the end though and does some stuff which is better than Against the Dark. I can see what is happening in this one too which is a plus.

The movie is built around a framing device of Seagal interviewing Goss about a mission that went bad. Most of Seagal's scenes are in this framing device and he just sits there mumbling nonsense for a lot of it. The rest of the movie is told in flashbacks.

The acting is fine for action sclock though some people, like Georges St-Pierre, are clearly here for their fighting skills rather than their acting ability. There are a couple of female characters who are apparently just here for their large talents, One only speaks a few lines at the very end and I don't remember the other one having any dialogue at all. Seagal is his usual mumbly, nonsense spouting self but he does stuff and has a fight scene which is better than some of his other movies. He actually gets hit and knocked down during the fight which was surprising and made it seem a bit more like he was in an actual fight with a real opponent. It's low effort but not as low effort as, say, Sniper Special Ops.

Where this movie really falls down is the pacing and story. There are stretches where nothing much is happening and people are just standing around talking. It gets really boring in spots. Then everything happens at once and everyone is shooting everyone. It would be charitable to say that the plot is complex. I would say that it's confusing and convoluted. There are twists that don't seem to serve much purpose beyond being twists. The final twist does make sense in retrospect and actually was set up though. A lot of the characters are barely characters at all. There were several "Oh no not...whatshisface/whatsherface" moments where someone was killed off and I didn't care because they hadn't been fleshed out at all.

This isn't comically terrible like some of Seagal's later movie. It's just below average action schlock with a needlessly convoluted plot. It's not the worst thing but there are lots of other, better action movies you could be watching instead.

I just watched Killing Salazar (Cartels)

The long fall from grace for Seagal continues. Since 2003, he has appeared in almost 30 STV movies. That's two dozen more than the 10 pictures from 1988-2002 that were box office hits. In the last decade, things have grown worse for what is left of his fan base, as he is now a supporting player (some times not even that) in his own movies. That's the case, once again, in this tripe, but it was strangely enjoyable tripe. I can't quite put my finger on why I found it semi enjoyable, I think it was because of Luke Goss, he was the best actor in it and i enjoyed his performance.

It looked like it had the biggest budget for a movie featuring Seagal for a long time, but for me Seagal was the weak point of the movie, he is a constant distraction every time he comes on screen with his bloated face and jet black hair and goatee. There were times he didn't even look like he was putting the effort in to realistically hold and fire a gun, let alone hit anything.

Steven Seagal has done some good, or at least watchable, films. Particularly 'Under Siege'. He has also done a lot of mediocre and less films, indicative of laziness and that Seagal was well past his sell by date, and a good deal of them are even very bad.

'Killing Salazar' is one of the very bad ones, with exactly the same time as 'Contract to Kill' except not quite as bad. Awful even, and for me if ranking Seagal's filmography from best to worst it would be towards the bottom. Did not expect much, but watched it because Seagal has shown signs that he can be halfway decent and as said not all his films are bad. Also do appreciate the action genre and there are good films out there in the genre, classics even. 'Killing Salazar' is far from that, more closer to a waste of time that shows little signs of trying.

Seagal himself, in a role that is not a lead but more an extended cameo, gives another lazy and wooden performance that shows that he was not interested and wanted to be somewhere else. His reading-from-an-autocue-like and robotic line delivery in particular betrays that. The rest of the cast are just as poor though in all fairness have little to work with and over-compensate.

The characters are ones we know very little about and don't care what happens to happen, so unengaging and one-dimensional they are. The dialogue is risible, with a lot of cheesiness, awkwardness and far too much talk delivered with little emotion or momentum and bordering on the near-incomprehensible.

Its excessively talky nature affects severely the pacing, which never comes to life. There is no urgency, let alone tension, intrigue or suspense. The action doesn't feature enough in comparison and suffer from pedestrian choreography and laughably bad editing. The story is by-the-numbers, dull and not always easy to follow.

Direction is flat and ill-at ease, while the sound/soundtrack are one-note and obvious as well as poorly recorded and the whole film looks cheap. And it's not just the editing, the slapdash effects and drab photography.

Overall, a mess in every single way. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Once more big old Seagal makes more of a cameo appearance in this movie as---well, does it really matter who he played? It's basically Steven Seagal. He does not have that much range to him.

Anyway, he's interrogating Luke Goss who plays an army man on a special ops team, that screwed up their mission. I always felt that Luke Goss was somewhat of a poor man's Jason Statham, but I only think that way cause he took over the Rebooted Death Race Franchise. In this movie he tells Seagal the mission in flash backs that remind me of Die Hard as the whole thing takes place in a Hotel in Romania where the bad guys take over and Goss has to sneak around them to complete his mission, which is grading the head of a Cartel from people who want to kill him after he flipped on them.

The strange thing is, despite Luke Goss' character being set up as the main protagonist, it's not his name that comes 1st in the credits (Or rather second after the extreme cameo Seagal). It's some guy named Georges St-Pierre. He does not look familiar, but I'm guessing he's a MMA fighter. My guess is based on the fact that he has that cauliflower ear thing that Randy Couture has. Wonder if you get that ear and they force you to retire and become an actor? I hope not, and I hope he's a better MMA fighter than he is an action hero.

Speaking of action, that's the real reason we go see a movie Seagal's big head would be the center of on a poster right? Well the action is mediocre. Cartels is more of a crime mystery movie as the players try to figure out a tangle web of people double crossing each other. This leaves the filmmakers trying to make something that looks suspenseful but does not have that much action to it. But unlike a lot of movies I've seen recently were Seagal is given a fat check so we can watch his fat ass sit around for ten minutes trying to sound cool, he actually does get up and puts down a few moves, like the fight he has with Georges St-Pierre, which becomes one of the rare moments when someone is able to put Seagal on the floor (or rather the stuntman, in fact I would not be surprise if Seagal did not even know that his character showed a moment of weakness until the film came out). Plus,there was this really neat action sequence that had a lot of gun play inter-cut with a lot of fight scenes in which the good guys had one on one battles with the bad guys.

It's not the best movie (far from it) but I still get a kick from watching Seagal slur thorough lines wishing he was Brando and repeating the same moves over and over again that he's been doing since he gain the pot belly, but I would skip it unless you're that big a fan of Seagal (or just like making fun of him)

http://cinemagardens.com

... while others in this age are already in a nursing home of their choice or enjoying some beers in their local dive bar, another great Sensei Seagull documentary is on the way. We are truly blessed. /cynism OK, guys and girls, nothing to see here, move on. It's just another lame direct to DVD movie of an former actor who recently is just moving from chair to chair. If you want to see something good and really interesting stare at a wall and watch some paint dry. Simple as that! This movie is so bad it's not even worth watching it for free! You have been warned! Don't do it! Just don't! You know how hard it is top write a review consisting of ten lines of text, when you can say everything of this movie in one word? Guess the word, it starts with "S" and ends with "hit". Enough said.