Review of Belly of the Beast (2003) by Blake B — 24 May 2009

In my quest to see every Steven Seagal movie and earn my PhD. in Seagalogy, I have yet to come across a movie from Seagal's direct-to-video catalog that is anywhere close to good. After seeing BELLY OF THE BEAST, I can say that this is probably as close as we're going to get.

I was actually excited about watching this one, mainly because it was directed by the great Ching Siu-Tung (aka Tony Ching), the guy who directed the fabulous ninja epic DUEL TO THE DEATH and choreographed films like HERO and John Woo's A BETTER TOMORROW II.

It's rare that Seagal gets paired with a competent filmmaker, especially one that can make him look good during a fight scene given his frequent, painfully obvious use of stunt doubles these days, however Ching makes Seagal look as good as he possibly can, given his weight and his poor choice of wardrobe.

A lot of the filmmakers Seagal works with now make the poor choice of speeding up the film to make Seagal look faster than he really is, however Ching instead uses a lot of slow motion, which works a lot better, even though he tends to overuse it at times.

The movie opens with a breathtaking action scene that's both awesome and mildly horrifying at the same time, and while the movie tends to drag in places, the action is always interesting, even when it gets extremely silly (I'm thinking of the fight scene with the whip-wielding tranny in high heels).

They run from gritty and cool (the opening) to flat-out stupid, but they never cease to be entertaining. The movie also employs evil Taoist wizards in the plot, which scores it a few more points in my book, you don't see those much outside of movies like THE BOXER'S OMEN.

I'll be very surprised if I see a DTV Seagal flick that's better than this one (but it's not a "good movie"), it's one that casual fans of action movies can probably enjoy on some level, given they can make it through some of the cornball moments that you have to suffer through here and there.