FILM: ON DEADLY GROUND

by Shari Goldsmith Seagal plays Forest Taft, an employee of Agis Oil. Agis, owned by sleazy Michael Jennings (Michael Caine), is building a huge refinery in Alaska, which has been causing oil spills because of faulty protectors. Jennings keeps using the bad protectors while claiming that he doesn't know what's causing the spills. Not to worry, Taft discovers this corruption and attempts to save the world from environmental ruin. The corporation finds out, and Taft's life is saved only through the intervention of friendly Eskimos. What follows is a barrage of strange events in which Taft wrestles a bear and emerges from a lake as a sort of baptism. All of this is accompanied by drum-based music, an attempt to display Eskimo's lives and their belief in spirits. But all Seagal ends up doing is mocking their customs. Later, when his Eskimo woman companion (who's only purpose is as the token woman in the film) suggests that they use the spirits to destroy the refinery, he all but laughs in her face. This film seems more like a comedy than an action movie. After punching a guy who was insulting an Eskimo, Taft reasons with him and asks,"What does it take to change the essence of a man?" Later, he becomes MacGyver, turning a coke bottle into a silencer. But if your stomach doesn't hurt yet from laughing, wait until the finale, where the film makes an attempt at being an environmental documentary with pictures of destroyed lakes underscoring Seagal's lecture about big business' oil spills, oil cartels, and the importance of recycling. In his attempt to produce a film with an important issue, Seagal loses the intense action and suspense that made his prior movies enjoyable. It doesn't work to give an environmental or anti-prejudice speech when it is intermixed with violence. At the end when Seagal profoundly states "our planet is dying" you might think he should worry about his career and leave the planet's fate to the environmentalists.