Jay Acovone | Through the Shattered Lens

17 year-old Brad Crain was at the movie theater in April of 1991 to see Steven Seagal’s latest action film, OUT FOR JUSTICE! Seagal’s career had shot out of a cannon with his first three films being the highly successful movies ABOVE THE LAW (1988), HARD TO KILL (1990), and MARKED FOR DEATH (1990). As a guy who loved action movies, Seagal (with his pony tail) was a cool new action star, and I was down for it.

Steven Seagal plays Detective Gino Felino, a Brooklyn cop called into duty when a guy who grew up with him in their neighborhood, mob enforcer Richie Madano (William Forsythe), goes completely off the rails. Hooked on drugs and looking to settle some personal scores, Richie murders Gino’s partner, and begins turning their neighborhood into a war zone, even pulling a woman out of her car and blowing her away in broad daylight over a simple traffic incident. Convinced that Richie will not leave the neighborhood he grew up in, Gino talks Captain Ronnie Danziger (Jerry Orbach) into letting him have an unmarked police car, a shotgun, and his approval to engage in a manhunt for the drugged out psycho. From that point forward, Gino shakes down Richie’s family members and associates to try to find out where he is. As bodies and broken bones pile up, Gino is determined to do whatever it takes to bring Richie to justice!

I’ll just say up front that OUT FOR JUSTICE is my personal favorite Steven Seagal film. It’s not the crowd pleaser or the box office champ that the next year’s UNDER SIEGE (1992) would be, and film critics largely blew it off when it first hit cinemas, but it does feature the star at his most charismatic, something that would all but disappear after the mid-90’s. I love the way Seagal plays Gino. Sure he’s tough, but he talks more, he laughs more, and it feels like he’s actually enjoying himself. His Gino isn’t just a badass cop, he’s a neighborhood guy, a former street punk who grew up and made something positive out of himself. Seagal’s performance here truly works, and he plays the role with so much confidence that it’s a shame that he didn’t remain this engaged in future performances.

OUT FOR JUSTICE is a badass action film. After it opens with Richie’s horrific murders, it then follows Gino’s hunt for the killer into smoky bars filled with wannabe tough guys who know more than they’re letting on. They get their asses handed to them. It follows Gino as Richie’s goons attack him at various places, from meat shops to apartment buildings, and he dispatches them with calm precision, but often in gruesome ways. I still wince when I see the results of meat cleaver fights and close quarter shotgun blasts. OUT FOR JUSTICE is a throwback to an era when action films featured men with integrity who kick ass and take names. While the movie does have some melodrama and humor, at the end of the day, this is tough-guy cinema done right.

I did want to shout out a few other things about OUT FOR JUSTICE that helps put it over the top for me. William Forsythe is incredible as Richie Madano. He’s sweaty, twitchy, cruel, and completely unhinged. He makes you believe that he’s literally capable of doing anything, and it seems like his goons may be following more out of fear than anything else. His Richie is a man who doesn’t expect that he’ll be alive that much longer, so he’s willing to cross every line that may have once mattered in his life. Director John Flynn captures the urgency of the film’s action very well, and we can feel the tension as Gino tries to locate the crazy Richie as quickly as possible before more innocent people are killed. He isn’t afraid to show the brutality of the violence as part of Gino’s quest, either. This shouldn’t be surprising when you recognize that Flynn directed the revenge classic ROLLING THUNDER (1977) about fifteen years earlier. The one last thing I wanted to point out about OUT FOR JUSTICE is that it was written by R. Lance Hill, who wrote the brutal Charles Bronson hitman film THE EVIL THAT MEN DO (1984). These are talented guys who know how to tell tough stories about even tougher men who are willing to do what it takes to get justice when no one else can.

At the end of the day, Steven Seagal would go on to make a lot more movies, but I don’t think he ever quite recaptured the balance of charisma and toughness that he shows here. And OUT FOR JUSTICE is a badass action movie that doesn’t really care what movie critics think, either. Buoyed by Seagal’s performance, the film’s action is angry, focused, unapologetic, and still hits hard over thirty years after it was originally released.

“WILSON!”

Seriously, I’m usually pretty well-behaved when I watch a movie but every time I see the 2000 film Cast Away, I find myself thinking, “Protect Wilson! You must protect Wilson!” And then, every time, I feel the sting of tears in my eyes as Wilson, with that red-face and that understanding attitude, goes floating away.

Wilson is a volleyball. When a FedEx executive named Chuck Noland (played by Tom Hanks) finds himself stranded on a desert island, Wilson becomes his only companion. A stain from Chuck’s bloody palm creates something that resembles a face on Wilson’s rubber surface and Chuck spends a lot of time talking to Wilson. It’s how Chuck maintains his sanity, even as he loses weight, sheds most of his clothes, and grows a beard.

Chuck learns how to make fire. He learns how to catch fish. He is able to survive due to the supplies that he gathers from the FedEx packages that were being carried on the plane that crashed into the island. But Chuck never stops dreaming of returning home to his girlfriend (Helen Hunt). Eventually, Chuck finds the courage to try to make the journey back to civilization. He brings Wilson with him but ultimately, this is something that Chuck is going to have to do on his own. Of course, Chuck has failed to consider that he’s been gone for years. He is presumed dead. On the Island, time seemed like it was frozen. For the rest of the world, life has continued.

Cast Away is a film that a lot of people, especially online film commentators, tend to criticize. The complaint is usually that the film is essentially a commercial for FedEx, that it’s not believable that Tom Hanks could survive on that island for as long as he did, and that the film itself has a weak ending. I’ll concede that the film does make FedEx look like the nicest corporation on Earth. (FedEx’s CEO appears as himself, which should tell you something about how the company is presented.) And I will admit that the film’s time-advancing jump cut, which abruptly takes Hanks from being clean-shaven and husky to being thin and bearded, does leave a lot of unanswered questions. But I will always defend the film’s ending. The film ends on a note of ambiguity but how else could it have ended? Everyone thought Chuck Noland was dead. His girlfriend had every right to get on with her life and, in fact, it would have been psychologically unhealthy for her if she hadn’t. As for that final shot, it’s an acknowledgment that Chuck doesn’t know what lies ahead of him in the future. All he knows is that he life isn’t over yet. It’s a melancholy ending. It’s a frustrating ending. But it’s also the only way the film could have ended and therefore, it’s a perfect ending.

Cast Away is a film that I will always defend and it’s also a film that really only could have worked with Tom Hanks in the lead role. He plays Chuck as being the ultimate everyman, an affable guy who was just trying to do his job and whose survival of the initial plane crash was largely due to luck. Hanks is one of those actors who is instantly sympathetic and Cast Away uses his screen persona to good effect. You want him to survive because he’s Tom Hanks. He may be playing a character named Chuck Noland but ultimately, he’s Tom Hanks. He survived being trapped in space. Surely, he can survive being stranded on an island. The majority of the film is just Hanks talking to himself. This would have brought out the worst in so many actors but Tom Hanks makes it work. And yes, he’ll bring tears to your eyes as he watches Wilson float away. That’s the power of a good actor.

As for Wilson, I like to think that he washed up in Pensecola. Recently, I played a little volleyball on a beautiful Florida beach. Was that you, Wilson?