
#The foreigner 2003 movie
That movie was genius compared to this one. I thought "Fire Down Below" was horrid when that came out. It is right down there with "Ticker" as the worst Seagal flick ever. I rented it anyway while muttering that one phrase that has begun so many painful movie watching experiences: "How bad can it be?" I was surprised to see that they were not only negative but vehemently so.


Before renting "The Foreigner", I read some of the user comment summaries on the IMDb. *SPOILER ALERT* *SPOILER ALERT* This movie taught me an important lesson: I should listen to the user comments. Steven Seagal seemed to be making a comeback with Exit Wounds, but if his last film was half past dead, this one must be pretty close to filling out the other half. He might even get a little winded removing the wrappers from candy bars, although that's understandable if you estimate just how many of those he must have to eat to maintain his present girth. Seagal is in his 50's now and is a very large man, so he is reduced to a mimimal level of physical exertion and even during that he is contained in a knee-length coat to hide his inchoate Brandoesque girth. Seagal used to be a pretty fair hand-to-hand combatant, but the action scenes didn't manage to redeem this film at all. She could have found some activities more beneficial to her career, like having unnecessary surgery, ripping those pesky insert cards out of magazines, or taking some community college courses in animal husbandry. Either she was left on the cutting room floor or she wisely opted out of the project. IMDb says that Aussie actress Kate Fischer (from "Sirens") was in this film, but I'll be damned if I know where. ?" I couldn't even figure out the credits. At the end of the movie, I just sat there thinking, "That's the end? What the. Or should I say confusion? I don't know who was on whose side, or what anybody really wanted, and the resolution was as unsatisfying as the exposition. Allegiances shift often, adding further mystery. Some guys seem to die more than once, while in other scenes gunfights end without a clear view of the result, so the audience sees somebody die, but is not sure which one of the gunslingers is headed to boot hill. Many people blow each other's brains out. Many people have mysterious, cryptic conversations. Because he is a self-proclaimed "consummate professional" who has been hired to deliver the package only into the hands of the husband, Seagal at first defies the wife, then later gets involved in protecting her and her daughter from other mysterious guys with unexplained agendas, as well as from her husband. The intended recipient's mysterious wife tries to intercept the package before it can be delivered to her husband. Other really, really mysterious guys do especially mysterious stuff, all of which which was in fact too mysterious for me to figure out. Other highly mysterious guys try to kill the moderately mysterious guys who try to stop him.

Seagal is employed by a mysterious guy to deliver a mysterious package to another mysterious guy. I don't think I understood what was going on at all, except in the very broadest terms. What am I saying? It IS incomprehensible. Despite the size of their investment, Sony Screen Gems probably made the right move in shelving this movie. According to some reports, the film had a lavish $20 million budget, including location shoots in Warsaw and Paris, and was completed as part of the studio's obligation to a two-picture deal which was negotiated after the relative success of Exit Wounds seemed to indicate that Seagal still had a solid following. The Foreigner is a straight-to-video Steven Seagal film that was originally intended to be released as a theatrical feature in March, 2003, an intention which was reportedly reversed when Seagal's prior film (Half Past Dead) tanked at the box office.
