oh gods what have I done… I spent last night watching Steven Seagal movies on Tubi… while I was gaming, but some of it seeped into my consciousness… now I feel mentally hung over, like I kinda believe if I just grab someone’s wrist and twist it, they might go flying across the room and land on a table breaking it… like someone with a title like “CIA Dirty Deeds Man” is gonna say “we’ll send the best!” and they’re gonna call me and I’m gonna be able to pull a handgun and just shoot it without aiming and wave it at someone’s head and my highly-skilled adversaries are gonna just drop dead…

Seagal isn’t actually in most of this film, he’s just the “draw”. Most of the action comes from the other actors, who you kinda recognize as supporting cast from other movies. Anyway, “Mercenary for Justice” – let’s see if I can remember how this one goes…

  • Seagal is a lumbering killing machine who gets set up on a dirty op, but he gets out alive.
  • During the op, his friend who dies makes him promise to take care of his family, so he does.
  • And while he’s at it he gets revenge on the people who set him up.
  • And he gets his revenge while doing another op that involves putting together a team and rescuing the son of an arms dealer.

That’s all the plot you need to know. If you think about it too much it just doesn’t make sense – like at some point they just forget about the son of the arms dealer, and there’s a lot of going back and forth between a bank and a prison, which I think is supposed to be plot-twist-y like a caper film. According to wikipedia :

The director later said “the story was confusing because there were four writers on the film and things were left over from draft to draft. I pointed all this out to the producers, but they did not care. Also, the producers cut scene number 101 from the shooting schedule that played right in the middle of the film it caused a domino effect before and after. That scene was the tie-up in the movie. I talked until I was blue in the face trying to convince them the decision was a huge mistake. They did not care.”[4]
…
Fauntleroy claims the producers “just hated Steven and their whole existence was to destroy him, … and the film.”[4]

Anyway, the movie comes to a close when just the right number of people have been killed and a self-satisfied smile creeps across Seagal’s abundant face while his co-actors, with pained expressions, realize this might be the end of their careers…

The film has moments where it hints that it mighta reached Sharknado levels of camp awareness… like there’s this scene where people blow up and they go flying through the air and one of them is actually split in half! like you can see their guts and things. It’s only for a split second tho. (heh, “split”…) And the CIA bad guy is actually called “Dirty Deeds Man” in an on-screen title. You think I was kidding about that? They coulda gone somewhere with that level of irony, but unfortunately they did not.

“Unfortunately” is a word I associate with this film a lot. Like, “unfortunately, I watched it.” And “unfortunately, I feel obliged to tell you where I watched it.”

But it’s a terrible, terrible feeling to wake up the next morning from a depraved orgy of Seagal-movie-watching… just don’t do it…

“that’s the LAST time I let YOU choose the movie to watch…”