Art by Travis Wilker

I watched Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground back in January of this year and not a single day has gone by where I don’t think of something that happened in this movie at least once. It’s just one of the most insane movies ever made, it’s that simple. It’s an insane power fantasy. It’s like if MacGruber made a movie about how cool he thinks he is. Imagine How to Blow Up a Pipeline but it’s made by the biggest egotist action hero ever. 15 minutes into the movie, Seagal grabs a dude by his nuts and single handedly flips the dude over, and that’s only like the 73rd most insane thing to happen in this film. I mean there’s a part where he jumps between two cliffs on a horse. That’s the kind of stuff that goes on in this film at any moment. But most of all, On Deadly Ground represents everything that makes Steven Seagal STEVEN SEAGAL – as a human, as an action hero, and as an artist. Everything about him is laid bare for the audience, it’s him at his most transparent. It is the only film he ever directed, made at the height of his powers in 1994 after ripping off a string of classics like Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Out for Justice and Under Siege. He had one chance to direct a film and spent that chance making one of the most insane, glorious things I’ve ever seen.

With a script by Ed Horowitz and Robin U. Russin, On Deadly Ground follows Forrest Taft (Seagal), an expert firefighter who works for Aegis Oil in Alaska, putting out oil rig fires for Aegis CEO Michael Jennings (Michael Caine). After he discovers a coverup on faulty equipment causing oil rig fires, he’s left for dead before being rescued by Masu (Joan Chen), an Inuit environmental activist. They fall in love and he kills everyone in his path to blowing up the largest refinery that Aegis has. 

Forrest Taft embodies a lot of what makes a Seagal character tick. He’s a man of the people who’s the best at what he does, stays cool in any situation, always has some special forces background, is desirable to women, and his aikido can somehow trump any other fighting style. He arrives at an oil rig fire and lights a cigarette. He’s just that good. Seagal is perhaps action cinema’s foremost egotist. It’s just in everything he does on screen. Do I really need to explain it? He only plays characters that are seemingly infallible, who never make mistakes and are always right about everything. One of the appealing things about Seagal is that he clearly does not know how to handle a gun. Most action stars will at least try to look like they know what they are doing, whereas he is clearly too lazy to. I’m not even trying to talk shit, this disconnect between Seagal’s perception of himself and his actual abilities are a big part of what makes him so appealing to watch. Whenever it sounds like I’m criticizing his insane choices and boundless ego, I need to stress that those are the particular qualities that made him so damn watchable in the first place. 

Seagal has always had a fetish with both Asian and indigenous culture that always feels awkward at best, like a “I love Asian and Indigenous people so much it’s racist” thing but mostly just feels a bit revolting. Here his obsessions are taken to the extreme. He becomes an Inuit in this film. I’m not joking or exaggerating. There is literally a part of the plot where he undergoes a ritual to become the spirit warrior of the Inuit. Just incredible stuff. This is the magic of filmmaking, that we can make Steven Seagal Inuit. The only film he’s directed and had the final say in and he made himself an Inuit. What more tells you everything you need to know about Seagal?

One thing about this film is that nobody that dies in this film just dies – they die the most horrific, gratuitous deaths imaginable. Forrest’s old friend Hugh has all his fingers broken and a pipe cutter put to his leg like 25 minutes into the film. One henchman dies from a claymore being detonated against their chest, immediately after another one falls off a horse and gets impaled on a spiked log. He blows another one’s brains out with a pistol like 5 minutes later. I could go on and on listing examples. I’m not joking about the insane severity of the violence inflicted on anyone who dies in this film. MacGruder (lol)(John C. McGinley), the right hand man of Jennings, has his head put through helicopter blades. Some nameless assistant to Jennings isn’t even exempt. She’s trying to leave the climax in her car and crashes into an oil tank that catches on fire and explodes. Jennings gets roped like some cattle by Forrest and is dropped into a vat of oil. It’s all the most psychotic ways to kill someone. 

When Forrest kills henchmen, he doesn’t do it like an action hero, he does it like goddamn Jason Vorhees. When he first fights armed goons about halfway through the film, he is thrilled to have the chance to kill some bad guys. And he hunts them like a slasher villain in a horror movie, reveling in the bloodshed and pain. It’s just a really nasty edge to On Deadly Ground that could have easily made the film less enjoyable but instead just makes it more bizarre and unique. There’s just an insane amount of squib work here, bloody explosions happening at every chance. It makes me long for the days when even dumb shit like this film was done with practical effects and actual explosions.

This cast is insanely stacked for a film like this. We got names like Michael Caine, Joan Chen, R. Lee Ermey, John C. McGinley with even a brief appearance from the likes of Billy Bob Thornton and Louise Fletcher. We’re talking baby Billy Bob too, way early in his career with a little bit of fat still on his face. He’s got four lines as a nameless henchman and he crushes them all. I won’t spoil them, you deserve this surprise. Seagal wisely knew early on in Billy Bob’s career that he should give this guy a few lines. 

Seagal’s endless ego extends to the dialogue, where the villains will stop the film and talk about how fucking awesome and badass Forrest Taft is. This results in some of the most delicious dialogue this script has to offer. R. Lee Ermey, whose character is brought in to stop and kill Taft, chews through the line “My guy in D.C. tells me that we’re not dealing with a student here, we’re dealing with a professor. Anytime the military has an operation that can’t fail, they call this guy in to train the troops. He’s the kind of guy who’d drink a gallon of gasoline so he can piss in your campfire. You could drop this guy off at the arctic circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush and tomorrow afternoon he’s gonna show up at your poolside with a million dollar smile and a fistful of pesos. This guy’s a professional, you got me?” The coverage of him is just a closeup lit angelic. Then 5 minutes later he tells an Indigenous henchman “I want you to protect this entrance like it was your sister’s cherry, Tonto.” It’s incredible.

Michael Caine revels in the most glorious line of the film that also acts as another instance of the villain pausing the film to suck off Taft. MacGruder asks just who Forrest Taft really is. Caine, glowing, says “You wanna know who he is? Try this: delve down into the deepest bowels of your soul. Try to imagine the ultimate fucking nightmare, and that won’t come close to this son of a bitch when he gets pissed.” Remarkable bit of acting, it plays on repeat in my mind every day. And then he goes and does it again later, again telling MacGruder: “Forrest Taft is the patron saint of the impossible.” What a treasure Michael Caine is, congrats on his retirement. 

On Deadly Ground is also firmly in line with a lot of early and prime Seagal films that for all the carnage ensues, somehow have a bizarrely progressive message to them. In the end of Above the Law, the film points out that no CIA agent has ever been arrested or stood trial before. Fire Down Below is all about the evils of corporations dumping toxic waste into impoverished communities. Seagal gives a ten minute long speech at the end of On Deadly Ground about indigenous land rights and the evils of oil companies, the government and the media. It’s an absolute tonal whiplash to the previous carnage that needs to be seen to be believed. And apparently this sequence was originally going to be almost 40 minutes long before Seagal was forced to cut it down. Can you even imagine 40 minutes of Seagal preaching about these topics? It’s incredible even at 10 minutes. For Seagal, a man who I would never describe as someone with progressive values, the fact that so many of his films have them is one of the most interesting aspects of his filmography that doesn’t get brought up enough. 

I don’t even know what I wanted to say with all these words, I just can’t get this damn film out of my head. It’s genuinely unlike anything I’ve seen, few films you can watch and say that they were definitely made by an insane person. This is one of them, and it’s awesome.