ATTACK FORCE (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Few of Steven Seagal's action-movies have any metaphenomenal content, and I think only this one and a post-apoc flick called AGAINST THE DARKNESS qualify for inclusion in "the superhero opera." I have not yet screened the second film, but a couple of reviews say that Seagal himself is only in that one for about half an hour, and that the rest of the time, his character is extensively doubled. So if I want to list Seagal at all for his contributions, however small, to the world of "superhero-adjacent" projects, I guess ATTACK FORCE has to make the cut, because at least there's a lot of Seagal action here.

Now, I'm not a Seagal fan, particularly of his later films, where he became increasingly lazy in his martial arts moves and his line-readings. I like a couple of his earliest works, particularly 1990's MARKED FOR DEATH. But those days were long gone by the time Seagal not only acted in, but also co-wrote, ATTACK FORCE.

For once, though, the misfire of a Seagal movie was not primarily his doing. The Seagal-script had his character, army commander Marshall Lawson, and the men under his command investigate a covert alien invasion. These aliens were capable of morphing into humans, but they possessed super-strength, though no advanced weapons, being limited to edged weapons. They came to Earth to harvest human DNA for evil purposes. 

However, after Seagal and most of the actors finished the initial shoot, the producers didn't like the results. They did new shoots and re-dubs so that Lawson and his fellow soldiers were now fighting a bunch of Earth-criminals who used a super-drug to boost their strength to inhuman levels. The drug-designers and their allies seem to have no particular aim in mind; they just go around killing people at random and must be stopped-- though at no time do local authorities get called in. A couple of times, the reworked version includes lines emphasizing that the fate of the world is at stake, and these are certainly legacies of the original script.

There's no knowing if the original version was any better than the ATTACK we have, but at least the basic premise would have made a little more sense. The dialogue and acting is almost uniformly wretched, but that's because almost every scene is a lead-in to some scene of extreme violence or inquisitorial torture.

I don't know that all Seagal-fans follow his productions just to enjoy indiscriminate carnage, but I suspect some do. For what it may be worth, ATTACK offers lots of hitting and knifing, and that might be preferable to watching the main actor give any long speeches like he did in 1994's ON DEADLY GROUND.