General Commander

I'm sure this film cost a lot to make with all of the special effects...the problem is there wasn't much of a movie to go with it. The movie was unnecessarily "in your face" blood and guts (i.e. a mafia leader enjoying a meal while watching a man get his throat slit with blood squirting everywhere). I was extremely confused most of the time - the movie jumped all around the world with plenty of conversations in different languages with no subtitles. I'm talking like 5 minutes with no subtitles! Most of it didn't make sense anyway. Even when the conversations were in English...some accents were so thick I couldn't make out what they were saying. I think I got the main idea, but this movie took too much effort to figure out. I didn't really get the ending and I'm sorry I wasted a night on this.

Seagal seems to be struggling for funding these days, so maybe his days of filmmaking are nearing an end. Judging by the quality of them, we can only hope. This has the same quality as his East European stuff, and Hungary is one of the countries credited in its production, along with finance from the UK and USA. It was actually shot in the Philippines with an international cast. Seagal does his old TICKER trick, staying in a chair for most of the time and only getting out of it for a couple of heavily doubled fight scenes. The rest is a monotonous mish-mash of genre tropes with criminal gangs, kidnappings and shoot-outs the order of the day. I hated it.

These Seagull furmula flicks have gone from unintentionally campy bad to insultingly satirical. Unwatchable without the fast forward button. The arch bad guy is played by the former Jeffrey Epstien, who wishes he killed himself instead of taking this role.

Couple things I liked about this movie was the beautiful shots of the Asian cities that they were filming in. Hong Kong and Manilla both seemed breathtaking from the drone that they used. Also I liked the idea of an evil gang stealing organs right out of a healthy person which could easily be worth over $1million on the black market vs the standard drugs or guns exchanges. It was a great idea, but as expected executed very poorly. As horrendous as Steven Seagal's acting is in general I give him credit that there is only one Steven Seagal, and he usually has a way of putting his personal stamp on a movie no matter how bad it is, but this movie lacks even that signature seagal moment. When it comes to line delivery in "General Commander" it seemed like Seagal had recently had a stroke and was half in a coma because his usual low voice growl, was reduced to almost an incoherent grumble. They had to get as creative as they could with the action scenes to make up for a 300 pound man who can not raise his foot more than 8 inches off the ground. The supporting cast is one of the worst I've ever seen. I found Mica Javier's part to be the most annoying because she seems like just an average lady who they're trying to dress up and pass off as an intimidating Super-Spy Super-Model, tough as nails and all that, but she losses all credibility when her line reading doesn't sync up with her mean, poker-face act. There's a really weird point in the movie where they go way over the top with the sadness and sorrow and unfitting poor music choice for too long. It's a 2/10 for me.

Of course it's not great, but I can't complain... maybe a bit too short. I watched movies much worse than this. I always liked Steven Seagal, he's getting old, but still... Very bad acting by Italians, really awful, it wasn't a good choice... I'm Italian. Excluding the Italians, my score is 6.5... including them no more than 3 or even less. My opinion of course... nobody has to be affected by my review... watch the movie and decide yourself.