Bullet Points: Maximum Conviction
Today we celebrate the birthday of one of the greatest and most entertaining professional wrestlers of all time, Stone Cold Steve Austin. The amount of charisma that it takes to be that great in the ring has translated very well to the action film genre. He’s made quite a few movies to date; The Expendables and The Condemned are probably his most well-known but his tag team role in Maximum Conviction with Steven Seagal is probably my favorite. If you haven’t seen it yet you should hurry over to Netflix and stream the shit out of it.
The Gist: Security contractors Cross (Steven Seagal) and Manning (Stone Cold, Stone Cold) have been given the task of making sure that the closure of a military penal facility runs smoothly. It should be a walk in the park for a couple of hardasses like themselves but they didn’t expect all hell to break loose. Two female inmates are brought in the night before the closure and Cross is in the process of finding a place for them when a garbage truck filled with mercenaries led by Chris Blake (Michael Pare) attempt to recover the two inmates and kill whoever gets in their way. Cross and Manning, while separated, call a few of their buddies in to help with the situation and go about taking back the facility.
The Cast: Steven Seagal has pretty much been making decent DTV (direct to video) movies for several years. It should be no surprise that this film would also be pretty standard in the way of Seagal action DTV’ers. I wish that he would speak in a range audible to humans. It’s like watching a concert of dog whistle players. I had to keep turning up my TV everytime he talked on screen. Stone Cold, I mean, Steve Austin is awesome! The man is my hero. His character is awesome as shit and I always get excited to see him stomp a mudhole in someone’s ass. After they find out what’s going on, Seagal calls in a few of their buddies to help out. This was kind of surprising as I didn’t feel like they needed any help but enter Aussie Bren Forster, who had some good moves but still got punked out in the end. The two ladies that were brought in during the final prisoner transfer was to be expected and I half expected them to make them shower or something in order to get some T & A going.
Even Seagal and Stone Cold need help from time to time.
The Villain: Michael Pare plays the fake Marshal Chris Blake, who is attempting to capture the female prisoner in order to do something that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he has a bunch of mercenaries working for him, and Seagal and Austin are the type of guys who will murder as many people as necessary to get the job done. That should have been the synopsis right there:“Two groups of killers with automatic weapons trying to kill each other – only one group consists of Steven Seagal and Steve Austin!” Pare, despite already being heavily outmatched, does a decent job of being the villain even though you really never see him as a bad guy but more of a man who has a mission to complete. If I had to pick something that I would change about this movie it would have been a more extreme villain. You have to make him more heelish in order for me to hate him in the short amount of time that he has on screen.
Nothing says “you have no chance of surviving” like villains in ski masks and random black prisoners.
The Action: The action in this film is the reason you should watch it. There are quite a few really well-done shootouts and a couple of decent hand-to-hand fights. One such fight by Bren Forster came out of nowhere. I expected his character to die pretty quickly but he was cool to watch on screen. Seagal beat the hell out of a prisoner early in the movie and it was disappointing to say the least. His aikido has really just become him side stepping and slapping a guy several times with a bunch of quick cuts. It also looks like they used a double for Seagal for a lot of the fight, which breaks my heart. The prisoners only really serve two purposes: get beat up and killed with remorse, and try to rape every female on camera. Seriously, the entire movie all they talk about is raping chicks.
I like where this is going…
Take it Home:
- Super Size me: It looks like Seagal is on the Morgan Spurlock die.
- Yeah, we get it: Troy Disposal Services…what a clever name for a trash company that is really just sneaking people into the building. I don’t get why writers/directors feel like they have to do stupid shit like this. It’s not clever.
- Favorite Quote: “You gonna work out or you gonna fight?” or “No pain, no gain.”
- Favorite Quote: “Which one of you mother f**kers killed my future ex-wife?”
- Do you even lift?: I guess I never thought about someone being impaled on a set of dip bars.
- Invincible: I don’t recall one time when Seagal actually got hit by someone he was fighting. And he fought like 3 or 4 dudes.
Rating: 3/5
