Seagalogy: The Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal (New Updated Edition) by Vern

Author:Vern [Vern]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857687227
Publisher: Titan
Published: 2012-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20:

TODAY YOU DIE

“And I thought I was ignorant. This one crazy motherfucker.”

Behind Today You Die’s opening titles is a sound we haven’t heard in a while: the wailing white man’s bluesy rock guitar familiar from TV shows and action movies of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Between the subconscious Above the Law thoughts caused by the guitars and the undeniably awesome title, you might get your hopes up for some kind of throwback. A Golden Era style Seagal picture, just with a rounder face. After all, this was his first movie released after the formulation of Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt. So it was bound to have more gusto than his previous films, you might think.

Well, don’t get your hopes up. But at least it has a little different feel from the majority of the pictures in the DTV Era. The main plotline, while not exactly streamlined, is not as convoluted and indecipherable as movies like Submerged or Into the Sun. While painted as a good guy, Seagal’s character is a thief, with no mention of military or CIA background. The template of the movie for once is not the murky international intrigue thriller, but the old fashioned interracial buddy movie like 48 Hours, Rush Hour or Seagal’s own The Glimmer Man.

But the most distinguishing feature of the movie is the subplot that doesn’t seem to fit with the main storyline at all: something about prophetic dreams, ghosts and black magic. It’s hard to explain. Because how do you explain something you don’t understand?

Seagal plays Harlan Banks, a Las Vegas-based Robin Hood-like big-score thief who steals from “scumbag drug dealers” so he can “give to the poor.” The movie opens with Jada (Mari Morrow), his beautiful young African-American wife (or girlfriend, it’s not clear) getting a Tarot card reading. The reader tells Jada that someone close to her is “a reader of dreams, compatible with your gift of sight.” She describes him as “a man of power in both the physical and the spiritual world.”

We know because this is a movie that the tarot reading has to really mean something. It is a message. But then we discover that it’s not a real tarot card reading, it’s a dream – which itself is a message. Director Don E. FauntLeRoy assaults the viewer with an Avid fart, not just as an annoying attempt at modern style, but for its original purpose of subliminally conveying corny psychic premonitions or some crap like that. So we are treated with a digirhea blast that requires the pause button to study its series of images:

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