A Good Man

Released by: Lionsgate
Released on: August 19th, 2014.
Director: Keoni Waxman
Cast: Steven Seagal, Ron Balicki, Tzi Ma, Victor Webster, Massimo Dobrovic
Year: 2014
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The Movie:

The latest collaboration between Steven Seagal and Keoni Waxman takes place in an unnamed country in the Middle East where he plays a guy named Alexander who is part of a crack special ops team in the midst of taking out a high ranking terrorist thug. The operation goes horribly wrong when a planned drone strike fails and the terrorist succeeds in his daring escape. Adding insult to injury, a bunch of innocent bystanders is slaughtered in the ensuing chaos.

After all of this, Alexander takes some time off, opting to live the quiet life in somewhere in another unnamed country, this time obviously in Eastern Europe. Though he's rather keep out of trouble for a while, he can't help himself when he starts cozying up to his hot neighbor, Lena (Iulia Verdes), and helping out with her younger sister Mya (Sofia Nicolaescu). See, they have an American half-brother named Sasha (Victor Webster) who is in some trouble with a Russian mobster named Vladimir (Claudiu Bleont). Sascha works at a nudie bar that Vladimir owns, but that's not the problem. See, when Sasha and Mya's old man passed away, he owed Vladimir a whole lot of money and while the dude passed away without ever paying it back, ol' Vlad intends to collect. Alexander, however, is quite shrewd and he knows that he can play Vladimir against Mr. Chen (Tzi Ma), the man responsible for the incident that sent him into hiding in the first place in that opening scene…

Steven Seagal's post 2005 straight to video output is puzzling stuff and frequent Seagal co-conspirator Waxman would seem to be an enabler of sorts. How so? Well, Seagal has some weird tendencies these days and they all seem to show up in Waxman's movies. While Seagal no longer has the stupid Cajun accent he seemed to prefer in many of his recent films, he's instead coopted some weird sixty-year old white guy's take on modern Ebonics. As such, the portly Steve, now sporting what looks like a dead animal on his face and head (what the FUCK happened to his hair and what the FUCK is with that 'beard' on his face???) runs around talking like a gangsta rap/wannabe thug life poster child. Situating this in Eastern Europe and surrounding him with Eastern European co-stars only accentuates this and makes it stand out even more, and the results are just flat out bizarre. Long time Seagal fans who managed to sit through his Lawman TV series may recall moments in the series where he would approach black people at crime scenes and talk to them this way - he does a whole lot of that here, but there aren't any black people for him to attempt to relate to (assuming that's what he was doing?) so he just comes off as a fool.

The other recent is the whole 'fight scene/stunt double' thing. Whereas in his 'marquee star' days Seagal would be very clearly seen kicking the snot out of bad guys, lately we tend to see a lot of (sometimes painfully obvious) stunt doubles doing most of that with frequent cuts to Seagal, shot from the middle of his chest up, moving his arms at a medium pace and scowling. Sometimes during these shots he'll say tough guy things, other times he'll just stare into the camera in an attempt to look 'in the zone.' Regardless, what's important to take away from this is that he isn't really doing much in the way of the action scenes these days. There's a lot of that in this movie.

A Good Man isn't without plenty of entertainment value, however. We get a scene where Seagal goes to church for no reason and we get some scenes of Seagal hanging out with a dog. The requisite 'Steven Seagal bones down on a hot actress' scene is here too, so we once again lay witness to the sexy side of Steve and his tantric love making abilities. He disappears for about twenty-minutes in the last half of the movie to let other characters do most of the work and then reappears again towards the end to mutter some semi-coherent tough guy lines with lots of f-words in them. 'He' fights the bad guy towards the end. It all comes together with a remarkable amount of coincidence and half-assedness in the grand Seagal tradition, so if you've enjoyed his other recent efforts you'll dig this one too. It's fairly awful, but in a fun way and it is consistently violent and stupid, so it's got that going for it too.

Video/Audio/Extras:

The picture is presented in a pretty good-looking 1.78.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. There are some mild compression artifacts present during a couple of the darker scenes as well as some mild shimmering but none of it is overly severe. Colors look pretty bold and robust without coming across as overcooked, and the flesh tones in the film remain life like without turning too pink or too orange. It isn't a perfect transfer with the aforementioned authoring issues, but the digitally shot picture is clean and well detailed. The movie looks fine.

The English language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track does a great job of handling the action scenes for this film. It's a pretty aggressive mix that differentiates and places the action sound effects across the soundstage as required by the way the film plays out. Plenty of gunshots, bone cracking, sword swinging and cheesy background music swells up behind (not overtop) the dialogue, which lets the talkier bits stay clean and easy to follow. This DVD contains and optional English language closed captioning feature as well optional subtitles in Spanish.

Aside from a trailer gallery, menus, chapter selection and a download code for a digital copy of the movie the disc also includes a quick behind the scenes featurette

The Final Word:


Lionsgate's DVD release of A Good Man looks and sounds just fine for a low budget straight to video action movie even if there isn't a ton of supplemental material here. As to the movie itself, if you can get past whatever it is that's happened to Seagal's hair, it's a pretty solid, if slightly generic and entirely moronic, shoot'em up with some strong action set pieces and a briskly paced plot. Not a modern classic, but definitely a fun time waster. Kill some brain cells with this one.