“I liked what it had to say”: Steven Seagal’s awful contributions to environmentalist action cinema
Few actors have bought into their own hype quite as much as Steven Seagal, and while there’s nothing wrong with being a celebrity environmentalist, there are better ways to push that message to the masses than in a pair of interminable action flicks.
The stories surrounding Seagal since his very earliest days make fascinating reading, and not only because they paint him as the exceedingly unreliable author of his own mythology. He’s made a lot of enemies along the way, but at one time, he was a relevant enough figure in Hollywood that he was allowed to make his feature-length directorial debut on a $50million blockbuster.
Michael Caine regretfully broke his very own cardinal rule of bad movies to play the villain in Seagal’s On Deadly Ground, which did at least win him an award after he scooped the Golden Raspberry for ‘Worst Director’. It was just one of six prizes the environmentally-conscious dud found itself in the running for.
With all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, Seagal played a firefighter called Forrest, who finds himself in the employ of Caine’s unscrupulous oil tycoon. However, when he discovers that the company that pays his wages is complicit in ravaging natural resources and destroying communities in the name of turning a profit, he decides enough is enough and takes matters into his own hands.
On Deadly Ground literally ends with Seagal’s character delivering a speech at the Alaskan capitol building, where he preaches about the dangers of oil pollution and the damage being wreaked on delicate ecosystems by major corporations. His heart was presumably in the right place, but going hard on ‘The Message’ and turning his directorial debut into an uneasy cross between a passion and a vanity project was far from a rousing success.
Not that it deterred him from doing the exact same thing three years later in 1997’s Fire Down Below, which restricted him solely to being an on-camera performer at least. This time around, Seagal’s government agent goes undercover to investigate the death of an Environmental Protection Agency employee, where he unravels that another local mogul is up to no good.
This time, it’s Kris Kristofferson’s coal company owner dumping hazardous toxic and chemical materials into a disused coal shaft, and the results are largely identical after he kicks everybody’s ass and saves the day. Always one to toot his own horn, Seagal admitted to JoBlo that On Deadly Ground was among his favourite movies “because I liked what it had to say,” while Fire Down Below also made the cut because it “was a kind of environmental movie.”
It was a terrible movie, that’s for sure, following in the footsteps of its spiritual predecessor by snaffling a quartet of Razzie nominations, including ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Actor’. There’s no shame in shining a light on these kinds of issues against the backdrop of a gun-toting actioner. However, given Seagal’s incredibly limited ability as an actor, filmmaker, and person, he hardly instigated change single-handedly in the way he clearly wanted to.
