Into the Sun (2005)

I like Steven Seagal. Who doesn't like Steven Seagal? If you didn't I guess you wouldn't be reading this, yet alone watching the straight-to-DVD film "Into the Sun". The quality of his latter-career is nothing to talk about, and mostly disappointing and forgettable, but despite that I do find it hard not to sit there and be enthralled by the man. Even when his not kicking arse, and sadly I found "Into the Sun" (which Seagal co-wrote and produced) to have too little of it. More time spent sleep walking through it; however its glorious climax is indeed a bloody treat with Seagal going samurai. Chopping and slicing left and right, before breaking out the pistol. Even the editing stands-up better, as it's not choppy as hell (like some later films ala "Against the Dark"). We can "clearly" see him in action. It's too bad he spends more time looking good in his long black leather trench coat while simply wandering or strolling about; listening and talking… then listening some more… and then chatting away. You know; investigating (following up on leads and gathering info) and other things on mind like falling in love. He does take his sweet time, as his investigative partner grows impatient… maybe so the audience. Some times the language barrier (Japanese) keeps it distant, because you don't know what the characters are on about. No sub-titles, so it must be trivial. The narrative can get ponderous, but it's quite choppy too. There's a certain sharp slickness to the production, where it sets up some unnecessary computer images of locations. Fancy, but pointless. The performances are standard, decent enough. A blotchy, muddled Steven Seagal vehicle.

Steven Seagal, The man who seemingly can't walk past a Mcdonalds these days, is back and plays ex-CIA (as always) agent Travis Hunter whose assigned to investigate the killing of the Govenor of Tokyo, as the Murder seems to involve the Yakuza and as Hunter was raised in Japan, he has a lot of connections with the underworld.It actually sounds much better than it is, because INTO THE SUN is such an awfully boring waste of time.The acting is terrible (even by Seagal standards) The action sequences make no sense, Seagal walks around with an FBI agent (you end up thinking this is going to end up a Buddy Movie) but the Agent serves no purpose and doesn't last long anyway and gets quickly forgotten about.They couldn't even afford to hire English Speaking Japanese actors as you need to put your subtitles on to know what's happening, even then you don't care.This is such a disjointed, poorly edited, badly scripted mess. it's woefully Directed by a guy called 'Mink' only on his 2nd feature and it shows.This is such a badly made pile of garbage and a chore to sit through and it's even worse than SHADOW MAN (2006) - No way was anything close to $16,000,000 spent on this dud, maybe a tenth of that at the most. To add insult to injury, this trash is supposed to be a remake of the classic Robert Mitchum Film 'The Yakuza'AVOID!* out of *****

I've voted 5/10 for this film but only because I turned off after 34mins, which I've had to do for a couple of his movies.The filming was very good which makes a change for some of his recent films, many are filmed dark and poorly lit this could be lack of budget or the eastern European styling. However I thought Id missed the point of this film because some characters were speaking Japanese to English speakers and English to Japanaese - there were no subtitles and I hate them anyway, I only use them when Im watching a film in another language altogether or there is too much background noise, this meant I missed half of what was being said, its a bit like listening to half a phone conversation.I really wanted to see this film as some of the songs from the crystal cave came from this, however I decided I could live without watching it through, I was slightly concerned about Steven again being portrayed with a young girl as his lover, surely its more believable to have a relationship with an older woman, or would that just not suit his image? Oh hmmmm maybe tomorrows offering will be better, but Im not holding my breath of course

You can think what you want about Steven Seagal, but you definitely can't ignore him. He's not just a movie actor, he's an entire genre all by himself. Within that genre, "Into The Sun" isn't the worst. Not the best either, but worth watching all the way through. Seagal's a bit too out of shape to really match up to what he did in the early 90s, but at least it seems like he's actually trying this time around. He's probably still using stunt doubles, but he sure as hell does it more cleverly this time around. Generally the action scenes just look right, the visual style to this is excellent. I especially enjoyed the grand finale, which focuses on some really well-choreographed sword fights. There are some downsides too, but they are the same downsides pretty much every Seagal flick has. Why do people keep putting Seagal in love subplots? It's embarrassing to watch every time. Also there's the usual spiritual stuff that was only amusing once. This really isn't that bad, but yet again it brings absolutely nothing new.