Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground may be the stupidest goddam movie ever made, and by that I do not mean stupid fresh. After having been subject to a few minutes of this movie, I was mesmerized by the continuing torrent of offenses against reason and geometry. By the end, I was in full sputtering Ignatius J Reilly mode, throwing Milk Dud boxes and popcorn at the offending television images.
How insulting to common sense is it? Let's start with this "Plot Outline" from IMDB: "Mystical martial artist/environmental agent takes on a ruthless oil corporation."
Oh My God.
So apparently, the big problem is that this Evil Oil Company (run by greedy Rich White Men, specifically Michael Caine) have drilled a well in Alaska so they can import as much of as many kinds of poisons as they can get from the whole world over so they can pump ALL them down this oil well to kill all the cute little Eskimos and baby seals. Mwa-ha-ha! Naturally, they make a point to senselessly murder the wise old visionary elder Eskimo for no discernable reason.
Now, this doesn't sound like it could be right, and my people ARE admittedly from Kentucky, so I may have missed some nuance in that story line. But I'm not making it up. I swear to Rand that appeared to be the plot they were going with.
Among the atrocious and asinine pre-fab plot lines, he's Dances With Wolves- the ONE good white man who is down with the plight of the poor, innocent perfect indigenous victims. Seagal even gets to have a dream journey and hear about the fate that has been written for him.
But no- the movie's only getting ready to START getting ignorant. Naturally, the only way to stop Whitey's evil scheme is to murder dozens of people, and utterly destroy a big honkin' oil refinery or some such. I'd call Seagal's character an "ecoterrorist" but I'm afraid that would make this sound more interesting than it is.
Article comments
1 - Individualist
I took a vacation to Yellowstone a while back and we went on a white water rapids ride (low grade rapids - none above 2 I think). We passed on old oil refinery and the tour guide told us that the producers of "On Deadly Groud" wanted to blow it up for their movie. The company and the Park refused stating that exploding an oil well even a defunct one was a serious environmental hazard. Kind of puts the speech at the end of the movie in a new context, doesn't it.