Review #541: 'Hard to Kill' (1990)

Looking back on Hard to Kill - a film if released nowadays it would surely be lying in the straight-to-DVD bargain bin at Tesco - it is actually quite sad to see the once tall and lean Steven Seagal showing off his bone-breaking Aikido skills, given the flabby has-been that now graces the covers of movies such as Belly of the Beast (2003) and Maximum Conviction (2012). These movies tend to appear in the supermarket every other week and then seemingly disappear into obscurity, but the flappy-handed, pony-tailed beast that runs like a girl was once able to draw a cinema crowd. Yet watching Hard to Kill, one of his most popular titles from his early 90's heyday, it certainly poses the question of how?

Go it alone cop Mason Storm (Seagal) records a meeting between a gang of mobsters and Vernon Trant (William Sadler), and flees when they spot him. He divulges this information to one of his policemen friends, unaware that a couple of crooked cops are listening into the conversation. Arriving home to his wife and kids, he is greeted by a group of masked gunmen who kill his wife, and shoot Mason to within an inch of his life, while his young son escapes. Falling into a coma, Mason's death is faked by his best friend Lt. O'Malley (Frederick Coffin) to keep him out of reach of the mobsters. Seven years later, he awakens to a police force now overcome with corruption, and Trant now Senator. Along with nurse Stewart (Kelly LeBrock), who has been looking after him during his coma, Mason escapes the hospital to recuperate his strength and exact revenge on the people who murdered his family.

The action movies of the early to mid-90's were generally quite dull affairs, with television-quality attitudes to film-making, and the sound of machine-gun fire seen as an easy substitute to anything resembling genuine tension, and Hard to Kill is no exception. Apart from the delight taken in seeing Seagal being shot to shit, very little happens for a good fifty minutes. The silly and quite diabolically unrealistic plot is nowhere near engrossing enough to justify this, and Seagal's quite repulsive protagonist failing to provide a lead to care about. There is, however, one of the best one-liners in action history, when Mason overhears a television commercial for Senator Trant in which he uses the line "and you can take that to the bank!", Mason replies "I'm gonna take you to the bank. The blood bank!". Genius.


Directed by: Bruce Malmuth
Starring: Steven Seagal, Kelly LeBrock, Frederick Coffin, William Sadler
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie