Honestly, I think people don’t give Steven Seagal enough credit. Hear me out before you pick up that pitchfork. I’d say that most people know him from his 80′s string of action flicks — “Above the Law”, “Hard To Kill”, “Marked For Death”, and other equally generic and forgettable names. This is too bad, because those are not great movies. But they’re not great in a kind of enjoyable way. You know you’re going to get tons of Seagal attitude and not-believable action.
But the thing is, Seagal’s style of martial arts is Aikido, which looks completely fake until it’s being done to you. I used to scoff at its efficacy until I had a friend do some Aikido on me. You know those ridiculous scenes where it looks like the hero just grabs a bad guy’s wrist and the dude flips himself over? Well, that’s what happened to me: my friend grabbed my wrist, and I flipped myself over. I flipped myself because if I didn’t, the bones in my wrist were going to snap in half. That’s why Aikido doesn’t look like anything on the big screen — it’s all internal.
The crazy thing is, Seagal still makes movies. Look at his IMDB page. Tons of stuff on there! Granted, he produces them all himself, but he’s got quite a nice little niche existence going. And that’s not even counting his reality TV show “Steven Seagal: Lawman”. It’s just that he flies beneath the radar of the mass audience, so I don’t even consider him until I see video of him being an Aikido bad-ass, and I think “Hey, I should go rent one of his recent movies … just to see, y’know?” But unless they’re streaming on Netflix, it’s just not gonna happen any time soon.
I guess what I’m saying is, pony tail or not, I salute you, Steven Seagal. You’re okay in my book. Anyone who’s got a credit in the Onion Movie as “Cock Puncher” has got to be doing something right.
