Bullet Points: Fire Down Below
While celebrating the birthday of Steven Seagal last week I decided to sit down one evening with a bottle of Tennessee Whiskey and enjoy myself some arm-breaking from one of the best. Instead of enjoying a classic like Hard to Kill or Marked for Death I popped in an old DVD of a lesser known Seagal movie where he finds himself as a fish out of water in Appalachia. The whiskey no longer felt right…it felt too forced. So I walked down to the corner store and picked myself up a 12 pack of Blue Ribbon and settled in for a night of ponytails and loose fitting shirts; It’s Steven Seagal time!
Synopsis: After the body of an EPA agent is found in rural Kentucky, Agent Jack Taggart (Steven Seagal) is sent in undercover to try and figure out if his old pal was killed because he was getting a little too close to discovering if the local mines were housing toxic waste. Lucky for Taggart, he’s an expert in martial arts and none of the bad guys can shoot straight.
Backstory, Who Needs A Backstory: It’s so unimportant in this movie to know about Taggart’s life that we’re only told the backstory of the movie and his mission during the opening credits. The flashbacks that happen between ‘2nd Unit Director’ and ‘Sound Mixer’ tell us just enough information that we’re not scratching our heads in confusion. To be honest, Seagal played almost the exact same character in every other movie for the previous decade so he probably didn’t even realize that they never filmed a first act for the film.
The State of your Jackets, Man: Steven Seagal wears no less than three different leather jackets throughout the course of the film. Each of them seem to be more and more hideous. Maybe as he’s getting angrier as people keep trying to kill him, he changes into a shittier jacket in order to protect his other ones from bullet holes/blood.
Let Steven be Steven: I said that Seagal has already played this character and while that isn’t exactly accurate, he did play an environmental agent in the film On Deadly Ground but instead of toxic waste it was oil from a corrupt oil rig CEO. This movie came out three years after ODG so I’m guessing Seagal had either forgotten that he’d already done one film like this or that he just assumed he wouldn’t have to film many scenes because they could reuse a lot of the old stuff.
Young Stephen Lang: I have no memory of a young Stephen Lang. He isn’t exactly young in Fire Down Below but he’s younger than he has ever appeared in my head. To me he’ll always be Pickett in Gettysburg or General Stonewall Jackson in Gods and Generals. The whole Avatar movie, you may have heard of it, has caused him to become the go-to for ruggedly, grizzled badasses from now on but this movie actually shows Lang before he had the silver hair. If you don’t believe me, see for yourself!
A is for Action: The action scenes could have been a whole lot better. Seagal was already starting his down hill descent into straight to video-city. He doesn’t yet have the goatee but his action scenes aren’t as crisp as they once were. There may be no other action star to have such a noticeable dropoff in quality over just a few years time. The way the scenes are filmed in Fire Down Below doesn’t help either. The cuts are erratic and you miss half of the punches. The moves of Seagal used to look so deliberate but now they just look like he’s fighting a bunch of drunk college kids who keep running into his open hand slaps.
Didn’t think the EPA was an action packed lifestyle? Well maybe you’ll think differently when you read these bonus Bullet Points!
- Bruce Willis was going to play the lead role before Seagal. When Willis was involved it was going to be much more of a detective story and only became an action movie after Steven signed on.
- While they were filming in Kentucky there was a real EPA investigation going on nearby which closely resembled what was happening on set (minus all the ass-kickings). Seagal invited the agent in command of the investigation to the set and spent some time learning about what was going on in real life.
- Does the EPA arrest people in real life? Seagal beats up a half-dozen deputies and puts a gun in one guy’s mouth. I doubt that he would just be allowed to walk away from behavior like that.
- This movie has a shitload of country stars. I may have missed some but I recognized Kris Kristofferson, Travis Tritt, Marty Stuart, and Randy Travis.
- My favorite quote was when Seagal was going to let a guy go, “tell your boss I’m coming to get him”, but then decided to kill him instead, “You know, on second thought, I’ll tell him.” BOOM!
