[#Inktober2017]Attack Force (2006)Directed by Michael KeuschSteven Seagal rose to popularity in the early 1990s as an action movie star, and some of his earlier movies are really good. However, in the 2000s, much of his output has been direct-to-video movies, that have less action and less production value. There is a whole bunch of these on Amazon Prime Video, and I watched one of them, "Attack Force", yesterday. It was quite an experience watching it – the movie is quite bad, but it's interesting to analyse why this is so.The movie was filmed as "Harvester", a story involving Seagal battling vampiric aliens. However, before the movie was released, the production company decided to change the story. They got some of the secondary actors to come in, reshot footage, re-dubbed some of the dialogue, and re-edited the film to remove all trace of aliens. This was done without the involvement of the movie's co-writer, Joe Halpin, and Seagal.What we do get, is a story about Marshall Lawson (Seagal), whose team is killed off, and this sets him on a trail of a drug called CTX that gives people superhuman powers. There's also a military conspiracy surrounding CTX and the people who developed it.An apt description for the movie would be a mess – it's very difficult to understand, plot threads are picked up and abandoned, there is no sense of place or continuity, many times you don't see Seagal as there's a stand-in playing his character, about half of his dialogue is dubbed over by a voice actor who sounds nothing like him, and the movie ends abruptly. It's as if they put the minimum amount of effort into making something resembling a finished movie, so that they could release it. All this of course, is not counting the non-acting or bad acting, no development for most of the characters, bad dialogue, and lack of actual fighting. The cinematography by itself is mostly OK and the movie isn't boring. So it's worth a watch, especially if you are into filmmaking!This is a sketch of Seagal as Marshall and was drawn with a Bic ballpoint and white gel pen, this is a scan. It was drawn for the #inktober @inktober prompt word "trail". #297 / 22-Oct-17
Posted by Intagrate Lite