Sandcooler I love how you can see Steven Seagal's career go down the drain just by looking at his titles. In the early 90s he used to be all "Hard To Kill" and "Out For Justice", here he's..."Out For A Kill"? What does that even mean? Does that mean like, any kill? Does he just kill the postman and call it a day? Never thought I'd ever be confused by a Steven Seagal movie, but here we are. The action in this movie is incredibly repetitive, it's the same pattern over and over again. Chinese mob guy sends over dudes to kill Seagal, doesn't work, sends new guys, doesn't work, new guys, doesn't work, same old same old. It's somewhat mind-numbing, but luckily you can still laugh at the poor fight scenes and at Seagal being as agile as a washing machine. It's a well-known fact that Seagal has often had fighting doubles in his more recent movies, but in this movie his outsourcing goes even further: he has a talking double. A whole bunch of his lines are dubbed over, around halfway I started to wonder if Seagal even knew he was in this movie. And the ending, oh God the ending. Nothing could prepare you for that. This movie pretty much defines "so bad it's good".

TheLittleSongbird I will admit it right now, I am not a huge fan of Steven Seagal. He was good once upon a time, but recently he has resorted to poorly acted, sloppily paced and straight-to-video-quality films; Out for a Kill is no exception. I am really sorry, but I do not know where to start pointing out the things that are wrong with this movie.Now don't get me wrong, there have been some good action films, and I do like the genre, but as an action film and a film in general, Out for a Kill ranks towards the bottom of the spectrum. So where do I begin with the criticisms? How about the plot? The plot is so predictable and lame, and it takes such a while to get going. Plus by the end of the film I was running out of fingers to count the number of plot holes there were in the movie. Not only that, some of the plot holes are so big, you can drive a delivery truck through them.Or how about the dialogue? Like the characters, the dialogue is filled to the brim with clichés, no sense of intelligence or wit. What about the direction? Nothing there as far as I could see. It wasn't innovative, it wasn't sensitive and it wasn't good. Instead it felt phoned-in and derivative, as if the director wasn't really interested in the film.How about the quality of the film? Well, I'll answer that right off, it was shoddy and slipshod. The camera work, scenery and visual set-ups were incredibly shoddy, with editing all over the place, and done with no care. Even the action sequences were sloppy and unexciting, and the choreography is... how should I say it, ham-fisted. And what was up with the ending? Really ropey and a real letdown.Even worse was the acting. Steven Seagal looks really unkempt here, and he gives another lazy performance, while Michelle Goh is cursed with some of the worst dialogue of the film and the rest of the supporting cast were pretty much playing themselves. Plus I felt indifferent to every single character, none of them moved or compelled me in any way. Any redeeming qualities? Well, the opening just passes muster, but everything else is very hard to take and is a complete mess. 1/10 Bethany Cox

pjplives-1 It is good to see Seagal at work. No matter what his debt to the mob he still is fun to watch. I like movies without too much tension, where I know the good guy wins. So for my simple tastes the movie was fun.Years ago, I thought Seagal had the fastest hands in martial arts movies. Unfortunately, he has not received the recognition that other martial arts stars have.Many times a star is the same personality in all his or her movies. Such as John Wayne or Chackie Chan. It just becomes a matter of what stars you can identify with. When Arnold says, " I'll be back!" You have to be glad he is coming back.

James Hitchcock This is a film which asks its audience to accept that Steven Seagal is "Yale's most distinguished academic". An interesting idea for a competition might be to ask people to try and come up with a more egregious example of miscasting than that one. John Wayne as a drag queen? Woody Allen as a heavyweight boxing champion? Arnold Schwarzenegger as a seven-stone weakling? How about Steven Seagal as the world's greatest actor? Actually, even asking the audience to accept Seagal as a moderately competent actor might be a bit much. Make no mistake, this is a bad film indeed. It only gets a second star because it never quite plumbs the awesome depths of badness achieved by Seagal's other 2003 film with director Michael Oblowitz, "The Foreigner". The seventeenth-century poet John Dryden, comparing his detested rival Thomas Shadwell with other minor literary figures of the day, wrote:-"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence But Shadwell never deviates into sense". A similar distinction applies here. Whereas "The Foreigner" never deviates into sense, or comes within a thousand miles of doing so, "Out for a Kill" does at least make pretence to some faint meaning. Seagal's character, Robert Burns, is Professor of Archaeology at Yale University. (Burns was originally a master thief specialising in stealing Chinese antiquities, and gained his degree while serving a prison sentence. I doubt if in real life Yale would have awarded a professorship to a man with this particular curriculum vitae, but the film is presumably set in a parallel universe where seats of learning are happy to offer academic chairs to convicted felons). While on a dig in a remote part of China, he unwittingly becomes embroiled with a gang of drug-runners and he is framed on false charges of narcotics smuggling and the murder of his assistant, who was shot dead by the gang. He is released from jail by a Chinese cop (named Tommy despite being female) and her American colleague who hope that, back in America, he will lead them to the criminal masterminds behind the drug-smuggling operation. Unfortunately, the villains have not finished with Burns, and his wife is killed by a bomb intended for him. He sets out to get revenge, and the film turns into the normal Seagal mixture of gunplay and martial-arts sequences. It was ironically appropriate that in "The Foreigner" Seagal played a character named Jonathan Cold, because his performance seemed to come straight from the deep freeze. Perhaps he and Oblowitz recognised this unfortunate irony, because in "Out for a Kill" his character has a surname suggestive of heat rather than coldness. His style of acting, however, remains as frozen as ever. Burns suffers a series of disasters to rival the Book of Job, but neither being imprisoned on false charges, nor the destruction of his home, nor the murder of his wife, can elicit any degree of emotional reaction from him. Not that the rest of the cast are any better. In "Under Siege" Seagal made the mistake of playing against a major Hollywood star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose acting skills served to underline his own deficiencies in that direction. At least he avoids that mistake here. The way in which the villains are played implies a racist view of the Chinese, little changed since the days of those old Fu Manchu movies. The main difference is that the criminal mastermind Wong Dai is played by a Chinese actor instead of Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee, but the impression is still given that the entire Chinese race, except for attractive women like Tommy, consists of fiendish Oriental villains. About all one can say in the film's defence is that some of the martial-arts sequences are reasonably well done. Overall, however, this is the sort of cheap, shoddy and racist actioner which I had hoped Hollywood had given up making years ago. 2/10