In the Class of … series, Nick Rogers takes a monthly look back at films celebrating their 20th, 30th or 40th anniversary of initial release this year — four from 1984, four from 1994 and four from 2004. The self-imposed rules of the column: No films with an Oscar nomination and no films among their year’s top-10 box-office grossers.
This is also another crossover with the Coming Around Again series — a new, intermittent outing in which authors revisit films from at least five years ago that they reviled or that perhaps never quite clicked for them as they did consensus crowds. Just a bad day? Not the right time of life for that movie or message? Prescient in a way we couldn’t yet perceive? Each piece will feature sections highlighting how the writer felt the first time, why they wanted to revisit it, and their contemporary opinion.
What film is coming around again?
In 1994, Robert Zemeckis was not the only filmmaker to deliver an award-nominated, down-home homily of American values and virtues filtered through the mouth of a simple man named Forrest — whose epic journey of self-discovery sometimes found him contemplating the nature of his existence in our nation’s wilderness.
Neither was Forrest Gump the first such film, beaten to the bone-shattering punch months earlier by On Deadly Ground. Released at the height of Steven Seagal’s popularity and pomposity, Ground also represented the directorial debut of this leading man-baby, whose biography reads like some sort of super-sized Mad Lib with press citations.
Actor. Martial artist. Dojo manager. Fight choreographer. Sean Connery wrist-breaker. Self-proclaimed CIA asset and Yakuza fighter. Filmmaker. Draft-dodger. Blues guitarist. Sheriff’s deputy. Alleged serial sexual harasser and assaulter. Therapeutic oil product salesman. Friend to autocratic politicians like Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. “Worst host ever” of Saturday Night Live. Animal rights activist. Environmentalist. Deep state conspiracy novelist. Aftershave marketer. Vladimir Putin supporter and 2023 recipient of Putin’s Order of Friendship medal. Triple citizen of the United States, Russia and Serbia. Federal securities violator. Russian special envoy to the United States. Energy drink maven.
By all anecdotal accounts and measurable metrics, Seagal is a true Renaissance turd person. Of his black belt in aikido (bestowed in Japan, where he ran his then father-in-law’s dojo before moving to Los Angeles), Seagal’s first ex-wife has said: “The only reason Steven was awarded the black belt was because the judge, who was famous for his laziness, fell asleep during Steven’s presentation. The judge just gave him the black belt.” Now 71, Seagal has not released a film since 2019, and most of his 21st-century efforts have been largely low-budget offerings that went straight to the popular home entertainment format of their day. Maybe as Seagal sits in a chair while “fighting” on screen these days, he’s paying homage to that judge.
But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Seagal was a nigh-unstoppable goldmine of Hollywood B-movie action. The apocryphal tale goes that legendary talent agent Michael Ovitz was an aikido pupil of Seagal’s at his North Hollywood dojo, and Ovitz used Seagal to test his theory that he could make anyone a star. Indeed, Above the Law — Seagal’s 1988 debut as an action lead — was a modest hit, early-1990s brawlers like Hard to Kill, Marked For Death and Out For Justice brought in good money, and Seagal’s viability broke through in a big way with 1992’s Under Siege (certain to remain Seagal’s best film just as it has for the past 32 years).
With 1993’s The Fugitive, director Andrew Davis followed up Siege with an Oscar-nominated thriller that is still considered an exemplar of its genre. With Ground, Seagal followed up Siege with a Razzie-nominated … something that is, to be fair, also still considered an exemplar of its genre — the blowhard hyphenate-wannabe vanity project that cost half a hundred million.
Before getting too upset that someone allowed Seagal to direct any movie, let alone one with a $50 million price tag, know that no one let it happen again, Seagal had to star in two movies he was meh about to make up for going so far over budget, and at least some of those responsible were likely fired. And contrary to what perhaps should have been its legacy, Ground did not immediately torpedo Seagal’s career. He appeared in eight more theatrical films over the next eight years, including 1995’s make-good Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, another make-good glorified cameo in 1996’s Executive Decision, a different environmentally themed action film in 1997’s Fire Down Below, and the surprisingly solid 2001 DMX team-up Exit Wounds.
However, Ground set Seagal down a lifelong laughingstock path, and it’s a disaster to which people point first when (often rightfully) reflecting on the rotten aspects of his career.
How did I feel back then?
Like most inessential action films released before I could drive to see them, On Deadly Ground was first viewed on VHS on my dad’s basement surround-sound system. Derisive laughter does not constitute a formal review, and three decades of general disregard does not constitute considerable thought. So I had lumped this amid the one-star stack of Comrade Seagal’s films.
Why did I revisit it now?
Easy access to a DVD bought on clearance at Half-Price Books for $2, the tie-in of its 30th anniversary of release and, of course, masochistic tendencies. And while this should not be confused with the certifiable insanity of seriously reassessing Seagal’s integrity or influence on this score, well … there’s often something to enjoy, however purely nostalgic and separate from the film’s quality, about the craft of analog action. There was no way On Deadly Ground was secretly a Good Movie All Along, but perhaps entertainment could be found in that arena.
How did I feel this time?
On Deadly Ground opens on the sight of a bald eagle against what could just as easily be a painted matte as actual purple mountain majesties. Befitting the pinnacle of spectacle from a sultan of shamelessness that follows, Ground remains every bit the sort of destructive train wreck it has always been. And yet, it’s really one of Seagal’s best movies, however low that bar might be, and certainly more satisfying, however perversely, than any of his first four films.
It wildly veers from Seagal’s violent humiliation of barroom bullies and vision quests with severe astigmatism to brutal torture sequences of folksy oilmen, high-tech Rambo-lite ambushes in the Alaskan wilderness and Michael Caine once again feasting voraciously amid so much creative famine. It all builds to an anticlimactic screed from Seagal to an enraptured crowd at the Alaska State Capitol that goes on forever … and is just a TikTok boodily-boop away from something you’d still find making the rounds today.
The Forrest here has the last name Taft and a $350,000 annual salary as a blowout specialist. That sounds like R&D work of changing (or filling) diapers, but Forrest Taft is indispensable to Aegis Oil — a multibillion-dollar corporation content to carve up the Last Frontier how it sees fit. (“Alaska is a third-world country,” one executive quips. “It’s just one we happen to own.”)
Forrest’s six-figure salary probably buys him a lot of frilly jackets, and that’s the frippery we first see when he saunters up to a dangerously out-of-control derrick fire. Does Forrest stand cool, calm and collected while detonating the fire-quashing explosives he’s placed behind him? Of course, he does! That’s why Aegis CEO Michael Jennings (Caine) has hired him … despite Forrest seeming to have no public record of existence since 1987. (This will be very important later, both to sell the clenched fist of Forrest’s deus ex machina and for Seagal to let his real-life masturbatory mythmaking spill over into his art.) In this sequence and a few others later, Ground looks and feels like an honest-to-god $50 million movie — from the heroic-theme mastery of composer Basil Poledouris to often stunning nature cinematography from Ric Waite, a longtime collaborator of filmmaker Walter Hill.
Keeping on the subject of money: Forrest’s grizzled oil foreman buddy Hugh (Richard Hamilton) is upset Forrest would sell out like so. His response: “$350,000? I’d fuck anything once.”
It’s not the only sexual reference in Ground, and neither is it the most amusing or the most horrifying. Amid a spiritual vision in the second act, Forrest chooses Mother Earth over materialism — the latter represented in the form of a naked woman writhing in sexual thrall before him). And during a climactic confrontation, Jennings reminds him he and Forrest used to share sex workers in Bangkok. Even as pure mental conjecture, the idea of Seagal and Caine losing sight of where one ends and the other begins is nightmare fuel.
Thankfully, the only fluid Seagal shares with anyone here is a beer with Hugh. He claims to have evidence that Jennings is knowingly using faulty parts, endangering workers and jeopardizing nature’s splendor — all so he can get Aegis One, “the world’s largest refinery,” online before the rights revert back to Alaska’s indigenous Eskimo people. Forrest promises to investigate, but he first must deal with Big Mike (inimitable character actor Mike Starr), a racist oil rig worker who taunts an Eskimo patron with insults of “Geronimo,” “Cochise” and “Pocahontas” in the space of five seconds and has a bunch of buddies willing to risk life and limb to back him up. (Yes, that’s Louise Fletcher as the barmaid who begs Forrest to not break anything — which brings the count of existing and / or eventual Oscar winners onscreen in Ground to a stunningly high number of three.)
Except for Mason Storm’s prolonged coma in Hard to Kill, it was rare to see Seagal under any sort of physical duress on screen. His characters would quickly brush off the occasional punch, bullet or slash. But at no point in Ground does any human even put hands on Seagal, let alone represent a modest physical threat. (Seagal always really wanted to direct.) Not the barrel-chested behemoths played by Starr, Sven-Ole Thorsen, John C. McGinley or Billy Bob Thornton (who would have an Oscar for Sling Blade a few years later). Not the grizzled-veteran merc played by R. Lee Ermey. Certainly not the guy in the bar who looks north of 70 years old and whose wrist bone Forrest inverts.
Seagal flips one man overhead into a kick that takes out another thug’s face. He racks one man’s nuts, to which the man screams “My nuts!” Both moments are slowed down so you can see ’em real good. But Forrest saves his emasculating pièce de résistance for Big Mike — engaging him in a hand-slap game that descends into abject humiliation and then an existential crisis where Big Mike questions every decision that brought him to this splintered-sternum state. After punching Big Mike so hard he pukes up his halibut and then breaking his nose, Forrest asks: “What does it take? What does it take … to change the essence … of a man?” Through his mangled face, Big Mike answers: “I … I need time to change.” Putting a hand on his shoulder in solidarity, not a move to separate it, Forrest says: “I do, too … I do, too” and walks away.
In 1994, this was a deep-cut in-joke about a fragrance commercial featuring Seagal’s then-wife Kelly LeBrock. No one will get that now, so it merely reflects an oddly unresolved tension in On Deadly Ground between Forrest’s life of violence and his embrace of a spiritual awakening. As a real-world individual, Seagal is clearly on board with the give-back-to-Gaia aspects depicted in the movie. As a navigator of the Hollywood machine, Seagal is clearly concerned that leaning too heavily toward a pacifistic worldview would leave Forrest feeling like a soft doofus. So outside of a few awkwardly edited moments in the second act, his filmmaking instinct is to simply go hard against … well, every mercenary and brawler at Jennings’ disposal.
That’s because Hugh is right about what Jennings is doing. (And I’m sure Seagal has pointed out to everyone he knows that the parts mentioned here are akin to those that failed in real life nearly 20 years later for the Deepwater Horizon incident.) When Forrest finds the evidence, well … maybe he’s not entirely indispensable at Aegis after all. Jennings has Hugh executed and dupes Forrest into an explosive trap capped by a hilarious dummy toss. Everything seems good for Aegis’s bottom line and bad for Earth. Ah, but Forrest isn’t dead and is rescued by a group of wandering Eskimos who see the smoke and whose leader, Silook (Chief Irvin Brink), says: “The spirit of the man-bear lies within the smoke. I have seen it in my vision.”
The spirit of the man-bear, you see, is Forrest. But modest and humble as he is, Forrest tells Silook he is “a mouse hiding from the hawks in the house of a raven.” Oh, “that’s just what a bear would say,” Silook says. Dogs aren’t left out of the animal-kingdom equity, either, as Seagal inserts an utterly pointless scene in which a pack of them attack Forrest while he walks outside.
But maybe that’s the trial Forrest survives that makes Silook believe him to be the bear. The only other possibility: This movie once had an entirely excised act of Seagal completing herculean tasks in the snow. It’s also unclear why Jennings and his goons think Forrest is still alive or how they know to bring very large guns to Silook’s village and empty them into Silook.
“I loved your father,” Forrest tells Silook’s daughter, Masu (Joan Chen), in reference to a man he has spoken with twice at best. But despite Silook’s support and the Vaseline-smeared, sex-versus-salvation spirit dream in which Forrest grapples with a bear, violence remains a second language. Silook can talk all the “hippy-dippy shit he wants,” but if Forrest is to stop Aegis, he must literally burn it to the ground. So he and Masu make their way to Aegis One — tracked by Ermey’s mercs — to exact a fiery retribution.
How can a blowout specialist outrun a bunch of government-trained killers? Well, Forrest is one of them, too! You see, he has no record since 1987 because he’s been an asset for the CIA (just like, ahem, Seagal himself). Or maybe it’s the NSA. Or perhaps the DOD. “Whatever he is, he’s a damn problem!” shouts Ermey in that patented drill-sergeant enragement — a good line, but nothing next to his incredible third-act monologue about what a bad mamma-jamma Forrest is.)
All manner of lunacy follows — from Forrest and Masu leaping horses across a gorge the way Bus 2525 jumped a freeway gap that summer in Speed to setting up Thornton or McGinley as people who might cause Forrest to sweat only to have them die instantaneously and, lastly, one of the funniest car crashes of the 1990s. There are extremely satisfying kills here, many gorily exceeding Seagal’s traditional “break arm, throw ragged right-angled wreckage into breaking glass” move. After all, as Jennings screams: “Forrest Taft is the patron saint of the impossible!”
In that role, Caine represents perhaps Seagal’s only good directorial instinct: Shut up and let the legend do whatever he wants. Caine knows from garbage — even the ecological-disaster kind with The Swarm — and the man hoists this trash above his shoulders aided by a bolo tie, a prolific potty-mouth and whatever accent feels right moment to moment. Whether belligerently screaming at a woman slathering Noxzema on his face or carping about the shit smell of the caribou standing next to him at a commercial shoot, Caine earns the easiest paycheck he’s ever cashed. There’s no question that Tommy Lee Jones’s loosey-goosey turn in Under Siege remains the best villainous performance in a Seagal movie, but Caine’s silver medal shines.
Ground delivers persuasive, explosive goods before a denouement that dumps Forrest at the Alaska State Capitol. Here, lawmakers and locals look right past his long trail of death to deliver encouraging nods and rousing applause for a very long speech encompassing ecological endangerment, alternative energy, electric technology, dying plankton and the environmental and genetic damage being done to the human race that is making us all so angry. Perhaps this constitutes a breakthrough therapy session for a guy like Forrest Taft. Over footage more manipulative than a sad-dog Sarah McLachlan ad, Seagal blathers on for minutes. The story goes that this sequence went on significantly longer in test screenings until hooting, booing and obscenely gesturing audiences forced Seagal’s hand to whittle it down. It’s unclear whether anyone also stayed Seagal’s hand for the end-credits power ballad, but the Scorpions handle that one, too, and after nearly 100 minutes of herky-jerky lurching, Ground comes to a close.
Was I wrong way back when?
No, but also yes. Yes, but also no.
On Deadly Ground is a deeply silly and stupid movie. But from Seagal pouring out some soda to make a proxy two-liter silencer to a series of explosions as likely to yield uninhabitable land as Aegis’s oil drilling, it is a ceaselessly hilarious hallmark of hubris that simply never gets made anymore. Plus, its comparative quality is heightened next to truly execrable Seagal films from the 2000s like Out of Reach, Submerged and Attack Force, and it’s clear here that all the competent below-the-line craftsmen did their thing with likely independence from Seagal’s input.
Although one character precedes the other by 13 years, McGinley plays a bellicose brawler named MacGruder (a role for which Henry Rollins was considered). Indeed, On Deadly Ground has always been one flipped consonant away from parody. All these years later, it’s well worth the chuckle.