Too much of everything

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Fisrt at all I'm totally disagree with overall 4 of 10 qualification. This is a best seller of Steven Seagal. Like it or not. Many people user their personal hateness to comment. Just because. Because he is ugly, because it was autoproduced, blah blah. That's are not valid arguments. If you don't like heavy metal, you can't comment about Rock & Roll. So don't do it. The new spider man movie didn't like me. I think is just another easy to understand teenage movie but I won't comment. There is a brotherhood of kids who feels them self identified and it's ok but if you want to criticize you should use the same rod for all

After making a name for himself with his string of late '80s/early #90s action thrillers - mainly dealing with corrupt cops and tough city life - Seagal went on to bigger thing with UNDER SIEGE. However, after a while, something bad happened. Seagal, an environmentalist, got it into his head to include out-of-place messages to the viewers about the damage we're causing the earth, and this influence can be seen in ON DEADLY GROUND, FIRE DOWN BELOW, and even in his 1996 crime thriller, THE GLIMMER MAN. ON DEADLY GROUND is an odd film - a typical action fest, with some hugely inappropriate content seemingly tacked on in the middle and at the end of the film. The perpetrator of this crime is none other than Seagal himself, unwisely given directorial control for the first time (and probably the last, judging by the poor reception this film received at the box office). While I did enjoy moments of ON DEADLY GROUND as much as Seagal's best work, there are many problems to contend with.The first is the pacing. For an hour, the action content is kept to a minimum, with a single bar fight being the sole beating that Seagal delivers. Happily, he's up to his usual habit of breaking wrists and beating up on bad guys who are bullying an Eskimo for fun. The whispering hard man veers close to torture at one point, as he repeatedly humiliates and forces bone-breaking blows down upon his unwilling opponent. The rest of the hour's time is a literal whirlwind (no scene lasts for more than a few minutes, with the exception of one notable moment, which I'll come to in a second) of corruption and pretty scenery, and a silly moment where Seagal, injured by an explosion, is brought back to life by the Eskimos and goes on a 'spiritual journey'. What a load of rot.Now, I'm one of Seagal's biggest fans, at least of the films he made in his heyday, but this sentimental stuff is hugely out of place in a film like this. In fact, it's laughable, and ruins any fun we might have been having as it's just so darned boring. And pointless. Happily, once it's over Seagal gets down to shooting and breaking up the baddies, and this time around he has more than his fair share of enemies to combat, the body count reaching the mid 30s and being surprisingly high for a film of this kind. In the final act, he infiltrates an oil rig and blows everything up. This part feels a lot like UNDER SIEGE and follows the basic pattern of blow something up, kill some baddies, blow something up, kill some baddies. I love films like this and the deaths are all varied and quite creative, some guys burn, a guy is thrown into the rotors of a helicopter, someone dies in a car crash, other guys are beaten to a pulp. Seagal makes traps for his enemies, just like in the UNDER SIEGE films, and these are bits I love too. The best bit was where he used a plastic coke bottle as a makeshift silencer for his gun.The acting ranges from the hilariously inept to completely over the top, courtesy of Michael Caine as the stereotypical comic book-type villain, who constantly swears and rants at people. He's great. I know how people hated to see this fine actor lower himself, but over the top acting is one of my secret loves (over the top acting that is, not wooden acting). Seagal is his basic self (let's face it, he plays the same character in every film), while Joan Chen is virtually unnoticeable in a supporting role. John McGinley lends solid support as a fellow bad guy, as does R. Lee Ermey as a crew-cut mercenary. ON DEADLY GROUND is by no means a good film, and it's seriously marred by Seagal's self-righteous speech at the end about pollution. Yes, man, we agree, but not here! There is some good action and good fun to be had if you can overlook these flaws. A classic example of a so-bad-it's-funny film.

Even if all of the explosions, action and martial arts sequences had been done well, they would be hopelessly drowning in one of the most blatant and over-the-top environmental message you will have ever seen. "On Deadly Ground" is a preachy mess of a film. The antagonists are one second away from growing curly mustaches and twirling them while clubbing baby seals and the protagonist is kind of a bully that prefers solving his problems with violence rather than common sense. There are also plenty of ridiculous over-the-top sequences that feel completely out of place with the pro-environment message that it's trying to shove down the audience's throat. There's ham-fisted and then there's "On Deadly Ground" who take the ham off of your plate, shows you the pig's family before it was slaughtered, beat you to death with it the chunk of meat, tosses your ravaged body out of the window and onto on gas-guzzler that explodes due to the impact and reduces the nearby winter coat store to a pile of cinders. (On VHS, January 2012)

Most action stars can be pretty physically appealing for their roles. Not only physically appealing, but also smart. Take an action star like Steven Seagal. Seagal had appear in 5 movies over the last 5 years. His first movie was Above the Law, made in 1988. In that movie, he did a pretty good job, playing the leading role. In 1990, he returned to the big screen for two more action pictures. Hard to Kill and Marked For Death. I enjoyed Hard to Kill, marginally. But, Marked For Death was awful. The following year, he made the movie, Out for Justice, which was kind of silly and predictable. Then in 1992, he teamed up with Andrew Davis, the same director who made Above the Law, Seagal signature film. Under Siege was a good action film, loaded with evil villains and a routine plot that we've seen before. But in 1994, Seagal was given the chance to direct and star in the movie, On Deadly Ground. In this movie, Seagal plays an specialist of oil handling. He is also, as it seems to be an CIA agent. When an evil oil tycoon wants to dominate Alaska's frontier with his fresh supply of oil, he must reason with the locals and persuade the Native Americans that their territory is going to damaged by the oil-drilling. Michael Caine plays the bad guy in this movie, and he hires an group of murderous henchmen to kill Seagal and his colleague, played by Joan Chen. Meanwhile, Seagal eludes Caine's goons by planting explosives and setting up all kinds of booby traps to disable them, even cutting them off on their trail. There are so many explosions in this movie, so many of them, that it got up to a point when I couldn't keep up with the explosions. Also, there are other problems that get in the movie's way as well. Stereotyping of Native Americans in this movie are very unnecessary, and even walking on the same story of when the bad guys disturbs the Native Americans' land. We've seen that a hundred, if not, thousand times in the movies, starting way back into the early days of the westerns. And, the biggest one of them all is the ending of this movie. At the end of this movie, when Seagal finally kill all of the bad guys in the movie,(even Michael Caine), and blows up an entire oil refinery, owned by Caine, he gives an environmental speech about how cars will run on water, garbage, other liquids. I'm not sure if this is correct and if its even possible, but that speech comes way out of left field. Steven Seagal can be a good action star. He even proves that in his other movies like Above the Law or Under Siege. But, in On Deadly Ground, that kind of star power is blown away. (Did I say blown away? I really mean that statement.) What surprises me is that Seagal directed this movie, and he shows nothing exciting or artistic in this movie. He probably thought that the only way to direct an action movie is by putting in a lot of bad guys, gunfire and a whole lot of fiery explosions. Maybe he should've learn from Andrew Davis, the man who directed him in his two other movies. On Deadly Ground certainly does live up to its title, but it didn't live up to Steven Seagal. ★ 1 star.