Steven seagal – Page 2 – Podcasting Them Softly

That’s right, the Onion News Network made a movie, back in 2008, and it’s every bit as irreverent, satirical and wantonly bizarre as you would imagine. They have been comically killing it for years with their online platform, and the film is a nice extension of that. It’s episodic, meandering and devoid of plot, made up of many little sketches and vignettes, some gut bustingly funny, others just plain odd. I have three favourites which pretty much sum up their inane, Monty Python type shtick: An out of work actor named Bryce Brand (Nick Chinlund is priceless I just a few minutes of screen time) arrives back home from drug rehab and is hounded by his agent to nab new scripts. He promptly falls into a weird new addiction that gets slapped sillily onto the headlines, thus ending his arc with deranged efficiancy. Steven Seagal shows up as a fat slob of an action hero aptly named ‘The Cock Puncher’, a lumbering buffoon who punches people in the cock, naturally. The third, and funniest sequence features a riff on the celebrity roasts of the 60’s, with some kind of amazing group of crusty old crooners hurling stinging and incredibly raunchy insults at each other with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It’s tough explain just how funny that bit is in a review, but suffice to say it had me roaring as loud as the obscene bunch of wrinkled baboons in the in the skit. There’s a plethora of other sequences which I’ve since gotten hazy about, but I remember many other instances of pure hilarity to be had. Watch for further celebrity appearances including Eric Stolhanske, Michael Bolton, Richard Fancy, Daniel Dae Kim, Brendan Fletcher, Rodney Dangerfield, Joel McHale and more. Side splitting stuff, if you’re into this type of humour.

If an eighth grade class raided their parents liquor cabinet, passed around a bottle, got good and loaded and took it upon themselves to make their own version of every 90’s action cliche, it would look something like Ticker, a wonderfully inept mad bomber tale that starts at rock bottom and cheerfully drills farther down, as well as into critics collective patience, it seems. It’s silly clunky and all over the place, but there’s a scrappy likeability to its amalgamated stew of genre tropes, masculine posturing and endless explosions. The bomber in question is Alex Swan (Dennis Hopper), a homicidal Irish extremist intent on making life hard for the San Francisco bomb squad, led by explosives expert Frank Glass (a laughably zen Steven Seagal). Hero cop Ray Nettles (Tom Sizemore) previously lost a partner to bombers and has a big score to settle with Swan. And so it goes. Bombs go off. Cops argue. They chase Hopper, who eludes them until the next set of fireworks destroy a wall glass panels or a bridge. Sizemore is surprisingly sedated, not seizing the opportunity to use his lead role as an excuse to tear through scenery like a bulldozer, as is usually his speciality. Seagal is so silly, his intended gravitas landing with all the profundity of an SNL skit. Hopper is demented, even more so than in Speed, and the rental fee is worth it just to hear his perplexing, absolutely wretched Irish accent. Not since Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away have I laughed that hard at an actor butchering the dialect to high heaven. There’s appearances from Nas, Jaime Pressley, Kevin Gage and the always awesome Peter Greene as ana a-hole fellow cop that hounds Sizemore any chance he gets. Quite the cast, and in a perfect world the film they wander through would match their talent. I watched this with the same morbid curiosity that the bystanders gawking at the resulting destruction of one of Hopper’s bombs no doubt had: incredulity and the inability to look away for missing a moment of a disaster unfolding in front of you.