Le Prix du sang

Former Russian diplomat and assassin Ruslan (Steven Seagal) is forced to reimmerse himself in the gang culture he thought he left behind when his family is attacked by his old cohorts at his daughter's wedding.

One of the first scenes of the film finds Steven Seagal seated across a table from a gorgeous babe (of course). Babe asks Steven to close his eyes. It's not as if you'd be able to tell, Seagal's face is constantly in a contorted squint. He doesn't seem to ever actually pronounce a line, just whisper his way through the film. Perhaps he thinks a Russian accent is a whisper?

"Driven to Kill" is not a driven film. For instance, why that title? Is Ruslan driven? It doesn't seem so. No one in the film seems to know exactly what it going on, not excepting the star. It is an uninspired, lackadaisical, but certainly not lazy film that makes an bizarre addition to the revenge genre.

All of the characters confuse themselves for each other until the film starts to resemble particularly runny porridge. Seagal's ex-wife and his daughter look the exact same age. The villains are all similar and none too smart but at least aren't all named "Ivan". The detectives are excruciatingly bad actors that make Steven Seagal look like Marlon Brando.

The cinematography is surprisingly decent. Overall the film doesn't outwardly look like a low-budget flick. It was surely filmed on the cheap in Canada and made to look like the United States. The action and fighting isn't terrible and kept me interested to see how our aging hero would take down the next baddie.

"Driven to Kill" is the epitome of a low-budget, fairly intriguing action movie ideal for late night viewing and late night reviewing. If you're a fan of Seagal or a fan of cheese, add it to your queue.

I thought that this was an OK film with the usual violence and action which accompanies all Steven Seagal films. In this one Steve is a former Russian Mafia villain who comes back into town after being invited by his ex-wife to see his daughter get married. However, his return into town is not met with approval from the local Russian Mafia boss whose son is in fact the guy who will be marrying Steve's daughter. Steve's ex-wife is then murdered and his daughter is badly hurt which is the cue for our hero to seek revenge. Fist fights, knife fights and shootings are a plenty as Steve rips apart the bad guys. Although Seagal films are not expensive glossy productions action fans should enjoy this one.

Recently, I was reading a review of another Steven Seagal movie, and in it the reviewer commented to the effect that it was just the same as his other movies. Watching "Driven To Kill", I got the same feeling. Oh sure, there are a few minor changes, like making Seagal a Russian (which leads to some unintentional hilarity, hearing Seagal's wheezy and pause-filled whisper doing a bogus accent.) But with the rest of the movie, you will see nothing new. Seagal is still fat, and he continues to wear heavy coats to mask his weight, and is mostly filmed from the chest up. (There is a very funny moment when we see him run for several seconds - he can barely do it.) It should probably come as no surprise that there aren't that many martial arts moments here compared to his early films, and they are rapidly edited and filled with shots of what appear to be doubles doing his work. The gun battle scenes are also equally hard to make out as well. The general production values (cinematography, set decoration, etc.) are passable, and that's about all that's positive I can say about this.

So about a year ago I set out on a fallacy-ridden quest to watch every movie that Seagal has ever made, and while this has not exactly made for much high-quality entertainment, it has definitely given me a unique perspective on the evolution of Seagal's storied career. Although one of the first of Seagal's new generation of films that I watched was Urban Justice, which showed an aging and widening Seagal lurking around Los Angeles seeking a two- dimensional revenge for his son's murder, and Driven to Kill, as indicated by the title, is pretty much about exactly the same thing. Except this time the son is a daughter. Oh and he's a NOVELIST. Did I mention that? Did Stephen King write this thing?

My initial response to learning that Seagal plays a successful novelist was shock that they actually took my advice and tried to top Against the Dark for stupid story ideas, but it actually turned out to be one of the best things in the movie. The funniest things, anyway. Don't get me wrong, I have much more respect for Seagal than most people do. I have always been a fan of his films ever since I was a kid and he was making hardened action movies and I even still enjoy them now that they are growing less and less distinguishable from each other. But seeing Seagal's considerable mass parked in front of a computer while his meaty hands prance across the keys was quite a spectacle indeed. I would venture to guess that Seagal has never sat in front of a keyboard in his life!

Sure this is a digression, but it calls into question his logical thinking in the movie's opening scene. He is sitting with his daughter, to whom he is still the greatest man on earth, and she asks him to explain how he does that old trick with the three upside down paper cups, one of which has a metal spike in it. She moves the cups around with all possible slowness, challenging him to lose track of it, and then he slams his hand down on one of the cups, which smashes harmlessly. "How do you do it?" she asks incredulously. "The trick," he says, "is to just not give a f#%k."

Or, more likely, the trick is to not understand that one false move and your writing career will be in grave danger because your sluggish typing will now have to be done with one hand.

The plot from Hard to Kill is recycled into this one. Seagal plays a former Russian mobster named Ruslan, and when an attack leaves his daughter barely clinging to life, he insists that her attackers can't know she's dead in order to aid his revenge plot, which takes up the rest of the movie. Complicating matters is the fact that her daughter is set to marry the son of Ruslan's former gangster arch-enemy, who may have been behind the attack in the first place. Ruslan is torn from a charming life of living in his sun-drenched beach-house and meandering his fingers across his keyboard and back into a life of crime.

Seagal's performance is uninspired at best, but he has made a career out of uninspired performances. Or at least his career has fizzled out into one uninspired performances. Van Damme has done the same thing, but he changed everything in the outstanding 2008 film JCVD. This is what Seagal needs to do now to win back his respect as an actor, make something real and quit pumping out the lumpy, direct-to-DVD cheeseballs.

The rest of the actors are beside the point, they run distant second billing to an actor who passed his prime nearly 15 years ago (it happened in 1996, in case you're wondering), and so don't really merit being mentioned here. But a bigger problem is that the movie does that maddening thing where there are foreign characters, Russian, in this case, who switch back and forth at random between speaking Russian and speaking bad English. If you're going to make a movie with foreign characters, just start it out in their language and then casually switch to English for the rest of the movie, like in The Hunt For Red October, or just have them speak their own language for the entire movie and subtitle it. Switching back and forth just calls attention to it.

More importantly, the action is badly screwed up. There is nothing quite so boring as these stupid shoot-outs where a lot of guys take turns spraying machine gun fire at each other, taking turns pumping all their bullets into the walls and then hiding so the other guy can shoot his gun equally harmlessly. It's like a road where every single car is blowing it's horn. No one really pays attention anymore, it just becomes noise.

But if nothing else, you gotta watch the movie for the scene in a strip club. Seagal and the bad guy's son go to a strip club and go to a private room together with a stripper, and you should see how uncomfortable Seagal looks it is HILARIOUS!

"Driven to Kill" (originally, and more appropriately, titled "Ruslan") is one of the best Steven Seagal flicks in a long time. Now, after total crap like "Kill Switch" and "Against the Dark," almost anything in focus would seem good. But D2K actually has a lot to recommend it--it has a strong, engaged bada$$ performance by Seagal, one with no obvious body/stunt doubles or voice dubbing, a straightforward story, and the kind of action you'd expect. The direction, while not splashy, is competent (a rarity for recent Seagal flicks).

Now, to be honest, it would take a few more million dollars, a lot of retakes, some recasting of supporting roles, and a car chase or two to make this into a theatrical action-exploitation flick along the lines of "Taken." But for a DTV movie Driven to Kill is actually quite exceptional. And for a Seagal DTV this is up there near the top of the heap with Urban Justice and better than Pistol Whipped. It reminds me of a Charles Bronson low budget mid-80s movie like Murphy's Law. However, the shortcomings that affect all direct to video movies with their short shooting schedules and low budgets also brings D2K down a bit as well. The biggest problem is that about half of the supporting performances are embarrassingly lame--the female police officer and the oily lawyer in particular. And there were also some really strange choices made for the film's score. Upbeat Russian folk music during dramatic and violent beatdowns? Seems odd to me. In fact, sometimes the music behind the action is so ill-fitting that it seems like we're listening to a placeholder score that the filmmakers intended to replace. They might as well have said "hey, get that old polka album--we'll use that music for the part where Ruslan cracks the guy's neck!"

But, despite these flaws, I really enjoyed D2K. It has a small scale old school action vibe that I could get into and little to none of the unintentionally comedic incompetence we have come to expect from Seagal's output over the past decade.