User Reviews

The movie is boring, the characters and scenarios are unrealistic, unbelievable, the action is hilarious. This movie is a big mess. It almost seems like when the action music kicks in, the most impressive stunt is running. Either voice is dubbed over with Mr. McGregor or steven sang too much and it changed his voice. There is way too much dialog in this movie, and extremely bad acting on everyones behalf. The movie is great sleep therapy. The fighting is laughable. The eye shape shift effect on the evil designer drug addict females was decent. The main villain was a joke and his character was poorly developed. The main villain was used to explain the story through interrogation, he would just throw random plots in such as (spoiler) "CTX (his designer drug)is going to be in the water supply" which is never addressed in the conclusion or even mentioned again in the movie. This movie is highly recommended to pass.

I think its time for Seagal to go quietly into the night. What I have just seen makes all his direct to video releases in the last few years look like his early 90's smash hits in comparison.

A secret bio lab is making a new kind of drug that jacks up a human's adrenaline system to the point where they become psychopathic killers or something. Somehow Seagal is supposed to stop the infection or its the end of the world...or something. Seagal also went through hit squads like jellybeans, every time I look up he was commanding a new face so it kinda got hard to follow character development as well I know Steven's athsma prevent him from yelling at the top of his lungs but even so why is he constantly being dubbed by people who sound nothing like him? Usually the films plot and action sequences can save it from being a total waste of time but this was not even close. Like I said, it was more of a horror movie with a lot of blood and shank stabbing rather than straight up fighting. The problem was it wasn't really scary and Seagal looked completely out of place because the infected people were supposed to have speed of light movement yet the 40 year old 280 lb Seagal killed them all singlehandedly? I guess the lone highlight of the movie was the first 20 minutes where the new recruits ask Seagal to come to the strip club with them.

2 out of 10

Plot Synopsis: Three members of an US Special Forces team are killed in their hotel room by a woman they had brought with them for some fun. Their boss, Commander Marshall Lawson, tries to track down the killer, only to find that the woman was infected by CTX, a substance created by a covert arm of the US military in order to turn ordinary people into mindless killers. With government agents after him, Lawson teams up with the scientist who created CTX in order to stop the spread of the substance.

The Review: After the modest success of his debut film ABOVE THE LAW, Steven Seagal has spent the early half of the 1990s making action films, his career reaching its zenith with UNDER SIEGE. Like most action heroes of the era, Seagal's popularity dropped down a couple of notches (he tried to regain favour with the public by making a couple of films where he attempted to reinvent himself as a crusader for the environment), resulting in his career becoming stuck in a rut. Aside from a couple of modestly budgeted action flicks, Seagal found himself in the same arena as his arch-nemesis Jean-Claude Van Damme – the DTV market.

Starting with THE FOREIGNER in 2002, the third era of Seagal's career began. From The Foreigner right up to FLIGHT OF FURY, Seagal made a whole heap of B-grade action films where he played a government agent (or ex-government mercenary, secret agent or CIA spook) out to avenge a friend's murder, stop terrorists from committing some nefarious scheme or unravel a government conspiracy. In all these films, Seagal goes about dispatching evildoers with brutal aikido moves & / or gunplay (in real life, Seagal is quite a crack shot with a pistol) while wearing a long black leather coat that he never takes off (possibly in a vain attempt to hide the pot belly he gained). Most of these films do not make any attempt to advance Seagal's career or even elevate themselves above the flood of DTV action films that have come out in the early-to-mid 2000s. Of these, Attack Force is the worst.

On a technical standpoint, Attack Force is pretty standard stuff as far as these things go. The action set-pieces are competently conducted, although they do tread on absurdity, with people being thrown through brick walls. Seagal does the usual rounds of being a military Special Forces commander with access to a top-secret military operation, something that is only hinted at, slicing his way through baddies with a pair of blades attached to his wrists.

Where Attack Force fails is in its scripting department – the story featured here is only the start of the film's woes. Seagal might be a decent action star but when it comes to writing, his characters range from absurdly defined stereotypes to faceless ones. Here the flaw is at its most magnified, with Seagal writing himself into a deep hole by featuring some real half-cocked military conspiracies involving some kind of drug that turns people into mindless killers; some fine examples of 'faceless' intelligence agents out to silence Seagal by sending entire strike teams after him & his men; a central villain who is not seen until the very end & so forth (don't get me started on the film's title, which is ridiculously generic to say the least).

While some of Seagal's films also featured banal writing, most particularly The Foreigner, they also had something else to offset these problems (usually plenty of plot twists & some real clever kills on Seagal's behalf, as well as slick direction by the various directors involved). Here none of those things apply – Attack Force is not only stuck with an incompetent writing team & poor direction but reeks of laziness as far as the story goes – not only is the villain's motivation for committing his evil plan ill-defined, the hero's motivation for tracking the villain down is attributed to mere coincidence – Seagal's team is killed by a hooker who has been infected by CTX by Adam Croasdell's villain as part of an experiment. There are also some unnecessary digital effects of victims having their eyes blink sideways, which doesn't make a lick of sense biologically.

When it comes to acting, Seagal goes through the motions with the same one-dimensional performance that he has made a career out of, but minus the self-righteousness that he displayed in most of his films. None of the other actors make anything even resembling a performance or even an impression. Speaking of Seagal, I noticed something strange – Seagal has had his voice dubbed over in half the scenes. Rumour has it that the film's plot was changed after shooting had ended. This makes the film quite dishonest.

If all the other actors beside Seagal did act some better, this would be a reasonable to good movie. If you are used to Seagal's typical voice, the voice-over is quite irritating and can't even seem to sound convincing. More disturbing is the fact that the dead people seem to be alive anyhow because they are still breathing (eg. woman shot in custody) and moving (eg. woman at table with head on her plate) And you even don't have to look that hard to see it for yourself! :) Indeed a quite messy movie with a lot of plot holes and but as a hardcore Seagal fan I got this movie anyway but I don't think I will watch this movie again. I want a Steven Seagal a la 'Under Siege' back!!