If Only the Oscars Gave an Award
for Best Kick
I have very little expectations
for a movie. I’d just like the movie to make sense, be worth the $12 to see it
in theaters, and have some realistic acting in it. One of my pet peeves is when
actors look out of place in movies. Charlie Sheen looked like he could bring
the heat in “Major League”. Tim Robbins had the same throwing motion as my
girlfriend in “Bull Durham”. That always bothered me, as he was a phenom
flamethrower, yet threw like a Kansas City faggot. When it comes to action
movies, I realize I’m not watching Shakespearian actors, but at least give me a
decent performance. That’s why there is one action star out there that I always
have to watch with a grain of salt: Steven Claude Van Seagal.
That’s right, it’s a tie between
Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme. Great martial arts experts, god awful
actors. Yet, I own several of their movies. Why? Because they are some of the
funniest movies in my collection, unintended of course.
We’ll start with JCVD. After
bursting through the scene in the late 1980’s, his first few films did quite
well. “Bloodsport” got him onto the scene, and his early movies were box office
hits. They kept it basic with JCVD. Early on, he played kickboxers, a karate
expert, and a soldier, roles that pretty much were tailored to JCVD’s
experience. Once the “Muscles from Brussels” actor hit it big, Hollywood
couldn’t get enough of him. They decided to branch away from kickboxing and
created more mainstream roles for him. Unfortunately, they required JCVD to act
and his acting career with downhill.
Sure, you can blame the writing
on “Street Fighter”, “Maximum Risk”, “Double Team” (co-starring last week’s subject
Dennis Rodman),”Knock Off”, and “Universal Soldier: The
Return”, but that was either a lot of bad writing, or one bad actor.
Lately, his career has gotten back on track with “JCVD”, where he plays a
somewhat fictional version of himself (just like The Weasel did in “Pauly Shore
is Dead”) and his upcoming role in “The Expendables 2”. It seems his
rejuvenation coincides nicely with Van Damme not acting outside his boundaries.
Steven Seagal knows how to do two
things very well: karate and being a shitty husband (twice he knocked up girls
that weren’t his wife while married). He is a 7th degree black belt
in Aikido and got his Hollywood start as a karate instructor. As a favor to an
agent (a former Aikido student of Seagal), Seagal starred in “Above the Law”, about
a cop seeking justice. The film was a surprise success and Hollywood decided to
run the same theme into the ground by having Seagal play a cop seeking justice
in his next three films: “Out for Justice”, “Hard to Kill”, and “Marked for
Death”. In 1992, Seagal played former Navy SEAL Casey Ryback in “Under Siege”
and it made him one of the hottest action stars in Hollywood.
No one could argue that S-squared
knew his way around a dojo, but the man couldn’t act. His delivery was as
vibrant as Terri Schiavo. Granted, producers paid him to kick the shit out of
bad guys and deliver horrific one-liners. His next film was “On Deadly Ground”,
where he played an environmentalist who defeats an evil oil refinery
corporation. This started Seagal’s decline, where he did have some successes
(“Under Siege 2: Dark Territory” and “Exit Wounds”) but more misses (“Fire Down
Below”, another freakin’ environment movie, and about 15 pieces of shit that
went direct to video.)
Despite their extremely flawed
thespian skills, I think I can save them. They need to star in a movie as half
brother mutes (Seagal is a cop in Thailand while JCVD teaches kickboxing in Los
Angeles) where their father has been brutally murdered by the mob for no
justified reason. They never knew about each other until the death, but now
team up to avenge their father’s demise and defeat the mob, one kick and throat
rip at a time. I would easily shell out $12 to see “Silent Treatment” in the
theaters.
This week’s “Props to a Black
Beezy” goes to Whitney Houston. Henny did a good job covering this earlier in
the week, and I’m going to focus on the good instead of the bad (drug
addiction, shaky marriage to Bobby Brown, her downward spiral of a career,
infamously announcing “crack is whack” on network TV before relapsing, or her
apparent accidental overdose.) Houston was the top female star for over a
decade. All upcoming female singers aspired to be her. She is an indirect
reason why shows like “American Idol” and “The X-Factor” exist today. Her music
allowed her to be successful as an actress. Lastly, her rendition of the
National Anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl should be the benchmark for all
professionals singing that song. She sang it with pride and emotion but didn’t
turn it into an eight minute song or flub the lyrics. When you look at the big
picture, she had a career that anyone would be proud of.
-Written by Marcus Boyd 
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