AGAINST THE DARK
Been a long while since I have seen any Seagal at all so I thought I would give AGAINST THE DARK a shot. It's Steven Seagal fighting vampires so how bad can it be? Well it's bad all right. Real bad. Greg Stillson on the cover of Time magazine bad. First off, it's barely a Seagal flick. He's really not in it that much to begin with, and when he is it just doesn't fucking matter. He's trussed up in the requisite black leather overcoat and equipped with his samurai sword but he basically sleepwalks through the plot-like story looking sad and puffy. He whips out the sword, waves it around and guys fall down. Occasionally, there will be a blood spurt or two. Most of the actual physical scenes are done by a member of his vampire hunting team. Second, they're not vampires so much as they are crappy zombies - a half-assed cross between the mutants of I AM LEGEND and any of a number of generic zombies from recent flicks. There's lots borrowed from I AM LEGEND the book, foremost being the whole " now, we're the monsters" theme that characters actually speak out loud just so you get it. The whole story takes place in an abandoned hospital which for some fucking reason no one can leave. It seems to have unlimited levels that lead no where. Everyone is trying to leave it yet can't seem to find an exit. Maybe it's a metaphor or maybe it's a play on that Sartre thing about not being able to leave, you know the one I mean...NAUSEA. Basically a group of idiots are hiding out in the hospital when Seagal and his crack team of hunters come into the story. Besides the other guy the team has two women who don't have any lines. Various infected types scurry around and we continually see insert shots of them playing with guts and trying to look scary. The survivors are in a hurry to leave but they still do shit like stop and have dinner. In the meantime, poor Keith David as a military commander is in another location arguing with a Matthew McConaghey type about "cleansing the area" so we can have some dramatic tension. The military will hit the building with an airstrike in an hour, so Seagal and the idiots gotta hurry. But they don't. More walking through the hospital. Eventually they run into a creepy doctor whose daughter is the next step in zombie/vampire evolution because she can think. It really serves no purpose. Characters do inexplicable shit like nap in the hallways. You start to loose count of the characters because they vanish and return without explanation or they lose each other in the hallways for no reason. The mutants can be killed fairly easily, yet Seagal and company use swords and knives for the most part instead of guns. At some point someone asks Seagal his name to which he replies "Towel" - or so I thought. It's actually "Tao". I'm thinking he came up with that on his own. At one point he slips into a weird vaguely Cajun accent. For some reason part of the hospital is full of old mannequins which could have been creepy with some good design and direction, but we get neither. Obviously the script-like thing used to make the movie-like thing is awful. I realize the difficulty of writing to the low budget but at least give Seagal some Seagal-ian lines, maybe something with some humor. Seagal himself looks completely bored and lacks any kind of energy so there's plenty of blame for him as well. At least they define "infect" for us in the beginning of the film.
I kept thinking of how much cooler it would have been if it had been Seagal vs. Dracula, especially the awesome Dracula of Marvel Comics TOMB OF DRACULA. Big cape, turns into a bat, all that stuff. Remember when vampires turned into bats? Seems like it's been a while.