Starring Mu Mu wearing aikidoka Steven Seagal... Man this one was awful.
http://www.horrorview.com/Into%20the%20Sun%20Shame.htmOh man, what the hell happened? I remember being a teenager, stunned at the amazing martial art (Aikido) performed by Steven Seagal in the opening five minutes of 1988’s Above the Law. I’d never seen such fluid and devastating cinematic combat, especially performed by an American. In 1988 Above the Law reset the bar for action cinema in the United States and thrust 6’5” Steven Seagal to the forefront of the action star A-list along Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme.
You’d think with such an amazing debut that even the expected sophomore slump would have only offered a temporary snarl in what should have been a brilliant career. But alas, Steven Seagal’s sophomore slump, slumped, and slumped, and slumped even more, until finally, in its death spiral he crashed and burned into the ranks of the Direct to Video B-list stars Marc DaCascos, Don “The Dragon” Wilson, Jeff Speakman, and Jean Claude Van Damme.
Weirdly though, every few years some studio decides to test the multiplex waters by releasing a new Steven Seagal flick without the safety net of Direct to Video. The most recent trend is pairing the increasingly porcine Aikidoka with any number of popular Hip Hop stars, and in at least one case, Keenan Ivory Wayans. These films “The Glimmer Man”, “Half Past Dead” and any number of oddly titled action pics all share one thing in common other than a significant decrease in cool Aikido fights; they all suck. They don’t work as martial arts pictures because there aren’t enough prolonged fight sequences and they don’t work as action films because modern action films rely on cool fight and stunt sequences (which aren’t in these films), they don’t work as police procedurals because the scripts uniformly suck, and they don’t work as buddy pictures because Seagal is unable to offer a single likable trait for the audience to reflect.