Cartels

An American action thriller; A story about a U. S. Marshal and his team who are flown to Romania with orders to guard a billionaire Russian drug kingpin called Salazar who has turned informer. An American agent will stop at nothing to root out the mole who compromised his operation. Keoni Waxman directs this explosive thriller and handles the action sequences with reasonable proficiency. Waxman has become the go-to man for Seagal who has improved the quality of his films in recent years. However, Seagal gives a mostly subdued supporting performance and cuts a tired figure at times. All in all, a passable action film but the script is marred by its over-use of profanities.

The main character in this ruins it with how boring he is. This story had a lot of potential but we get this Johnny Sins tooth pick looking soldier who you couldn't care less about which just like the movie before it Steven Seagal was in called "The perfect weapon (2006)" I think it was the main character of this that made the story boring where I couldn't wait for it to finish. Though the ending has a nice twist and the possibility of a sequel it's just dull.

There are some pretty good fight scenes, the bad guy is established pretty well but if you don't care for the main character of a story why even bother. Would I watch this again? no but I've seen worst movies with budgets 2x (minimum) higher.

What more can be said at this point? Steven Seagal, appearing slow as a sloth in the action scenes he's in, is cast in another hackneyed mess of a movie. Here he portrays a top DEA agent trying to get to the bottom of a botched U.S. Marshal protection plan for an Eastern European drug cartel boss, who was supposed to be transported to America, from Romania, to testify against his crime family.

As you might expect lots and lots of bloody carnage either with guns or martial arts sequences. The movie is very drawn out, as well, and by the time it ended I had zero interest in how it all turned out.

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

Bad bad bad ridiculous over acted just pathetic Don't really know how I watched more than 10 min as per someone mentioned in another review. Well bye bye