Welcome to week #2 of B-Movie Enema’s Steven Seagal Month!

This week, our large mound of pounding fudge rounds is doling out some Urban Justice. This comes to us from director Don E. FauntLeRoy. FauntLeRoy previously directed Seagal in Today You Die and Mercenary for Justimce. This would be his third and final collaboration with the actor. Aside from the trio of mid-00s Seagal action flicks, he also workj ed on the Anaconda series directing the thiyrd andm my z,a fourth films. He worked with Jason Connery, Sean’s son, on a superhero movie called Lightspeed which featured a character created bl Stan Lee.

Those directing credits aren’t too impressive, but he still has some impressive films on his resume. You see… FauntLeRoy’s real trade was as a cameraman. He worked behind the lens as an assistant early on in the 70s and 80s. He cut his teeth on TV before getting to be either an assistant cameraman or second unit cameramk,qan on films like Raging Bull, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, and The Goonies. Perhaps his biggest film on the list of films he worked on as a camera guy was in 1991 when e worked on Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

When he graduated to become the Cinematographer on films, he worked on cheap-o movies like Munchie, The Skateboard Kid, and Munchie Strikes Back. However, he did work on three episodes of Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero and eventually hooking up with Victor Salva on the first two Jeepers Creepers films. Maybe the less said about Salva the better, but the point still remains, it’s not like FauntLeRoy hasn’t done some notable stuff. It maybe bodes well that this movie might look decent at the very least.

Still, this is a Seagal film. It doesn’t take long for you to see where the troubles are when it comes to working on a Seagal film when you start to dig into some behind-the-scenes trivia for the film. So, yes, this is the third and final collaboration between FauntLeRoy and Seagal. That’s because the director was incensed with Seagal’s work ethic. I’m shocked by this revelation! Apparently FauntLeRoy only agreed to direct the film if Seagal would stay on set until he was told he could leave for the day. Seagal responded by doing everything in his fucking power to not show up at work and forcing FauntLeRoy to shoot around him most of the time.

The main problem with that strategy was that this film was shot in only 20 days. That means that it was crucial that Seagal was on set as much as possible. Sure, he still had some of his scenes shot with his stunt double, but this was a rare instance in which a direct-to-video Seagal flick featured the actor for a large majority of his scenes and shots – in this case around 90%. It also led to the final day of shooting requiring Seagal to work a 13-hour day to film 22 pages of script that featured vital stuff that the actor just plain skipped out on. All this led to Seagal just being Seagal on set. He had a really bad relationship with actress Carmen Serano, making her cry several times during production.

All of this led to FauntLeRoy and Seagal to never work together again.

Speaking of stunt doubles and Seagal being Seagal, I think I need to remind my readers that this month, in order for me to survive it, has been gamified. Each week, I will be counting the number of scenes that take place in a strip club, how many lines Seagal flat out mumbles or has spoken by an obvious voice double, and how many times there was an obvious stunt double used in Seagal’s place in scenes that should not require one. Surprisingly, despite the fact that doubles were used a whole bunch in his films of the time, I did not spot a single obvious double, but I did count 43 instances of overdubbed lines that sounded more like Kurt Russell than Seagal, and three scenes at a strip club (surprisingly, none of which featured Seagal IN the strip club himself). So the tally continues today, though, by all accounts, this may just end up being the “best” of the four films being looked at here in January.

The movie opens with a young couple waking up in the morning. They are fooling about in bed and the guy is getting called into work and the woman doesn’t want him to go. She’s doing that thing that only happens on TV and in movies where she tries to keep kissing him and seducing him to stay behind. As the guy drives into town, the radio talks about the gang wars that are going on around Los Angeles. He drives through what appears to be Skid Row and shakes his head in disappointment that these people are living this way.

He accidentally witnesses what appears to be two cops arresting a couple guys in a sportscar in an alley. The cops are pretty rough with the guys. This concerns the guy who happens to be an amateur photographer because the guys in the sportscar are white. LAPD probably would have just let them go and not use the same type of roughness in the arrest that they would use on other people on Skid Row. Oh… wait… That’s me projecting what I would expect to see onto this movie. Anyway, this guy takes incriminating evidence that the cops are planting evidence on the guys. They were going to flat out murder the guys on the spot, but realize they were seen. They instead take the guys and throw them in the back of the cop car and drive off with them.

Later that night, the guy, named Max Ballister, a vice cop, is called to meet who he thinks is an informant. So, he kisses his wife bye and goes off to meet the guy and says he’ll be back in an hour. When he gets to the meeting spot, a car playing loud rap music pulls up and someone from inside shoots Max dead.

We fade to his funeral. Now, I want to explain that I had NO idea that this guy’s name was Max. I also had NO idea he was a vice cop. The most important thing he had on him was his camera. He used it to snap a couple pictures of his wife before leaving that morning and it became important when he spotted the cops hassling the two guys with the sportscar. To be fair, we’re in the early stages of the movie, and we end up learning about this once his father, Simon (Seagal), enters the fray, but, again, it’s hard to get attached to the characters when you have to later catch up to what people are doing in a plot. I had to piece together what these opening scenes were with the help of Wikipedia. It would be far more direct to have a scene of someone explaining that, “Hey, that’s Max Ballister. He’s a vice cop looking in on dealings with the various gangs in this gang war stuff.” Instead, we just get a few minutes of him taking pictures, him leaving his wife to meet a guy, him receiving a couple phone calls that we don’t hear the other end of, and then, BANG, he’s dead. It’s now Seagal’s movie to come in and tell us the plot.

It’s why these cheap-ass action exploitation flicks are so frustrating in this era. It’s so lazy that we just have to accept that Seagal is Hero Man and he has deep feelings that he buries under his tough exterior and he’s gonna dish out some fuckin’ pain as the only way he can actually communicate how he feels about anything. It’s Tough Guysploitation. It sucks.

Seagal does the thing where he stands way the fuck over there while his son’s funeral is going on. He watches on stoically while his son’s wife and mother mourn the senseless killing of his baby boy. Now, in a more appropriate world and way that people should deal with this pain, he should be over there comforting people, but no. He’s gotta be tough guy and lone wolf man who must shoulder his pain alone.

Anyway, after everyone leaves, Simon goes over to his ex-wife who tells him that the police say this was just a random shooting and they may never know who killed him. She basically says this to goad him into getting involved and finding out who he should go out and fuckin’ kill. She tells him to stop by and pick up some of his files and personal effects. It’s time for Seagal to go on a bloodthirsty vigilante spree.

Simon’s first stop is to find a place to set up shop. Apparently, he needs to actually LIVE where the murder happened. He drives into the area where Max was killed. He finds a liquor store run by Alice, played by the aforementioned tortured soul Carman Serano. She also happens to have a shithole she’ll rent him for $125 a week. He explains who he is and why he’s there.

The very next scene has Simon coming out of the apartment and is confronted by two Hispanic gang members. One guy, a larger, bald one, says it’s his neighborhood and Seagal doesn’t belong there. It’s actually a scene that made me kind of laugh… in a good way. As the guy continues to tell Seagal to get the fuck out of his neighborhood, Seagal kind of gives him a cocky smirk and says, “Oh I’m gettin’ scared!” and then he beats the guy up. The other guy pulls a gun, and he quickly disarms that guy. I love this picture below. Because 1) I have to believe that Seagal’s plan that day was to go over to that McDonald’s for a Large Big Mac Value Meal, and then walk over to that Circle K to get a giant Polar Pop and 2) that guy in the background there is like “Holy shit, is that Steven Seagal killing a couple guys?!?”

Mark it down, Enemaniacs. This is the first time I actually enjoyed something in a Steven Seagal movie. It’s kind of playful. It made me have a decent chuckle. It’s what you should get out of Seagal instead of all the other dumb bullshit he does in movies.

He leaves a message with the big guy that he’s not leaving until he finds the motherfucker who killed his son. Alice witnessed what went on, because, well, she probably was pretty alarmed when Seagal made the guy empty his gun by firing it off. She didn’t seem too happy that Seagal did what he did. I’m guessing due to possible escalation right there at her store.

Seagal goes through some of Max’s stuff. He finds a card for Detective Frank Shaw. He goes to talk to him as Shaw is heading up the investigation into Max’s murder. Shaw reiterates what he told Simon’s nameless ex-wife – this was a random killing and the likelihood of finding who actually killed him is slim to none. Seagal goes into a game of 4D chess and asks if it would be okay to give Shaw a call every now and then. Shaw agrees and gives him a card and writes his number on the back – similar to the card that Seagal found with Max’s stuff. So, he asks if Shaw ever got the opportunity to meet his son. Shaw says no. Max worked Vice at headquarters and Shaw was stationed at this department since he first became a cop.

Seagal knows this wormy little fuck is lying.

That night, Seagal finds a young guy named Gary in his apartment. The kid says he was looking for him because he knew he was going around asking questions about Max. Gary was Max’s informant. Now, you think Seagal would be happy to talk to someone who knew his son, right? Well, if he is, he’s got a funny way of showing it. Instead of treating Gary with proper respect, he keeps calling him a snitch instead of an informant.

Still, Gary says he helped Max with some info here and there. He also talks about how Max used to talk about the great Simon Ballister. Through Gary, we also learn this is the East Side Gangsters’ turf. If Seagal’s not careful, they are going to come after him in force. He tells Seagal that the East Side Gangsters hole up in the projects. That was where Max was killed. That might be where Seagal will find the guy who killed Max.

Seagal goes to investigate the shut down projects and gets attacked by some of the members of the East Side Gangsters, but he beats them up and kills a couple of them. When one of them says “Fuck you!” to Seagal, he responds by saying he’s the one who will be doing the fucking now. Uh… Okay. Anyway, one of the guys says the East Side Gangsters are not the ones he’s looking for and they know nothing about the death of Max.

We meet the leader of the East Side Gangsters, Armand Tucker. He’s played by Eddie Griffin. Griffin came up through being a comedian in the very late 80s and early 90s. This led to him getting some fairly good supporting roles in somewhat significant films. Later on, he graduated to some lead roles in comedies like Undercover Brother. However, his star has been a little bit tarnished after taking a stance that Bill Cosby was a victim of a conspiracy and saying that several prominent black men have faced the same kinds of allegations Cosby did. That, to be honest, is likely the far worse PR move than referring to a Sikh as “Osama Bin Laden” in the aftermath of 9/11, though both are pretty bad things to do. He still gets some work in decent stuff like 2018’s version of A Star is Born.

Anyhow, Tucker is involved with Detective Shaw. Apparently, there is some sort of deal going down that Shaw is helping out with. When Tucker’s goons that Seagal didn’t kill return, Shaw is now aware that Seagal is messing with the people he is involved with.

In addition to that, Seagal asks Alice what gang the two Hispanic guys who hassled him the day before were with. She says they are part of the Hyde Park Gang. That gang is led by El Chivo. Seagal is curious if it’s possible El Chivo had something to do with Max’s death. Seagal goes to Gary, and despite Gary pleading with him that being seen with someone like Seagal doesn’t look good, he says get the fuck into the car. Gary tells him that it’s certainly possible El Chivo ordered a hit on Max. Max was involved in shutting down and raiding a lot of bookie joints which was exactly El Chivo’s business. As Gary puts it, when you start messing with a man’s money, it doesn’t take long before that results in death.

Seagal claims he doesn’t so much care about who ordered the hit and why. He wants the actual shooter. After getting info about where he can find El Chivo, Gary’s brother Isaiah wants to find out exactly what the fuck that was all about between this dude and his brother. Gary tells Isaiah Seagal only wanted to know where to find Ell Chivo. Isaiah tells him to stay away from Seagal and goes on about his business.

Now, I don’t wanna be “that guy” but unless this movie is trying to posit that all black guys in the hood drive 80s-era, white Cadillacs, Isaiah is driving the exact car that approached Max and where the gunshot came that killed him. I… I think the movie thinks the audience is dumb enough to not pick up on that so therefore just kind of went with it. Maybe it’s kind of a red herring, and if that is the case it will play out in the upcoming acts, but it’s definitely that car that rolled up on Max at the beginning of the movie.

Anyway, following up on the info Gary gave him, Seagal goes to the club where El Chivo can be found. The guy at the door tries to prevent Seagal from coming in, but Seagal gets past him after the guy says there’s another one he won’t be able to get past. Seagal goes upstairs and the second guy tries to stop him but Seagal twists his arm and throws him down the stairs. A third guy right next to El Chivo tries to stop Seagal but El Chivo calls him off.

El Chivo is played by none other than the legend Danny Trejo. Trejo has been in, like a fuckin’ billion things. We all know him. We all love him. We all know if we fuck with him, we’ve fucked with the wrong Mexican.

Seagal introduces himself and El Chivo apologizes about Max getting killed. Seagal says that some people are saying El Chivo knows who might have killed Max. However, El Chivo says he had no reason to kill Max. He calls Max a good cop and that, yeah, it might be true that Max shut down a couple of his bookie joints, but one getting shut down today only means a new one pops up tomorrow. So he doesn’t seem to have much animosity toward Max. Besides, a dead cop brings a whole lotta bad heat.

El Chivo points the finger at the East Side Gangsters and Armand Tucker. At first, Seagal thinks it’s just El Chivo sending him out to deal with his own rival. El Chivo cops to that but he says that doesn’t mean it isn’t true that they would have far more reason to kill Max than he did. Seagal believes him and they have a drink to finding Max’s murderer.

Turns out, that’s going to be real easy. Tucker has put a hit out on Seagal and sends Isaiah to do it. Again, Isaiah is in the same car that approached Max earlier. So yeah, they pull up next to Seagal at a red light and try to gun him down, but Seagal is too quick and reverses. This leads into a chase scene that proves Seagal isn’t just good at doing slappy fights or mumbling lines to make him sound cool, but he can drive a car pretty good too.

Seagal does a tricky move where he spins his car around and faces Isaiah and his buddy. He then shoots at them and moves out of the way just in time for them to crash. The other guy, Reggie, is knocked out, and Seagal questions Isaiah about who sent them to kill him. He takes their wallets and leaves them.

Seagal gets back to his shitty apartment and here’s where things get kind of stupid. Seagal opens up his computer and connects to some secure satellite hookup. No passwords used here. He just types his name and it connects him. He then is able to type in that he wants to look at the LAPD’s database where he can look up the info on Isaiah and, by extension, the East Side Gangsters. He just types in very simplistic commands and gets everything he could ever possibly want to know about these people. This includes that the LAPD knows Tucker is the leader of the East Side Gangsters, but he’s never been convicted for anything the gang is at fault for. He then calls a guy and says he needs to have a package delivered.

It’s all so very Seagal and almost something you can say is a common trope in his movies. He’s some sort of super soldier spy assassin guy and he always has a way to just type a few things into a computer and get all the info he needs, and he has guys everywhere in the world who can deliver to him a shit ton of firepower.

Isaiah returns to Tucker who is really disappointed in his inability to kill Seagal. Tucker says if he doesn’t kill Seagal, he’ll basically kill him, his brother, his mother, and the woman he’s knocked up (which also means his kid will die too). Armand Tucker is WAY over the top in this and it’s part funny and part kind of unfortunate. In fact, When Isaiah and the other guy were going around and trying to kill Seagal, they keep sniping back and forth about messing up the car, not be able to catch up to Seagal, and not shooting out tires. Then, you have Tucker telling some hoes that he’s about to have a four-way with that the only thing that Scarface was missing was a scene of him fucking. He then basically does a whole little series of jokes about what that would have been like. I mean… Yeah, it’s Eddie Griffin and you want to have your comedian in the cast to do comedic stuff but it isn’t funny. Everything basically makes the black gang out to be either a bunch of jokesters or a bunch of idiots who only bicker at each other instead of pulling off a job. It almost borders racist depictions of black people. No, check that. I’m assuming that we’re supposed to think that Seagal is smarter than the might that the black gang will throw at him.

Later, a group of skinheads, oh yeah… suddenly there is a group of skinheads in South Central Los Angeles. Yeah, I don’t know where they came from but they are waiting for Gary to finish playing a game of basketball so they can hassle him. Apparently, this sets off Seagal’s Spidey Sense and he just shows up to beat the shit out of them and save Gary so they can go somewhere else. One of the skinheads, in fact, the last one Seagal beats down, is played by Derek Mears. He played Jason in the 2009 Friday the 13th movie.

Gary might have some bigger problems than those skinheads. Seagal tells him he went and talked to El Chivo about his son’s murder. Seagal believes Gary lied to him for a pretty big reason. He tells him that he caused the little accident that Isaiah had the day before. He believes Gary is protecting his brother because his brother was the one who killed Max. While they talked, Seagal put a tracker in Gary’s backpack.

Seagal traces everything back to the upcoming deal that was discussed earlier between Shaw and Tucker. Basically, they watch a drug deal go down and Shaw has a sniper take one guy out which then causes a shootout that gets both sides of the deal firing on each other. The buyers and sellers both die in the shootout. Shaw and Tucker’s guys collect about 200 kilos of cocaine and about $3 million in cash.

Now, I ain’t gonna lie… I’m not entirely sure exactly what this D-plot is in this movie concerning this deal that leads to Shaw and Tucker taking these guys off the table and taking their drugs and money. I’m not entirely sure either how Seagal is using this exactly. He dropped a tracker into Gary’s bag and followed it to a location where he then found a car to put a tracker on. Is Gary here with these guys too? Where did he go? I guess this was maybe to give Seagal proof that Shaw was dirty and therefore protecting the East Side Gangsters from being implicated in Max’s murder?

Okay, so that tracker he has on Gary does come back to play into the next scene. After the big deal went down, apparently Isaiah and Reggie are still with Gary. They were waiting for Seagal to get back to his apartment. So, with the tracker in Gary’s bag, it tips Seagal off that there’s a hit about to go down – on him.

Pretty much all of the East Side Gangsters show up at Seagal’s apartment to kill him. Seagal tells Alice to go hide in the corner and he pulls out a military-grade machine gun and starts blowing people away as they come into his apartment’s front door. He then gives Alice a gun and says to follow him. He starts shooting guys in the stairwell. He goes outside and starts shooting people outside. Tucker then shoots and injures Seagal – a rarity in a Seagal movie. Tucker gets away as cops are on the way and Seagal nearly passes out.

Alice has a cousin named Winston who is a nurse at a hospital. He fixes up Seagal. Winston says he needs to take it easy or he’ll open up his wound and it’ll get infected. Seagal tells him to shove that plan up his dickhole because he’s got places to be. He goes to Gary and Isaiah’s house where he finds the .40-caliber gun that killed Max.

Isaiah, Reggie, and Gary come in and Seagal has no reason to not believe that Isaiah is his son’s murderer. He’s got the gun, but Isaiah and Reggie swear they had nothing to do with the death of a cop. Seagal begins kicking everyone’s ass. Finally, Gary says it was Shaw who killed Max. Gary overheard a conversation between Armand and Shaw about how they needed to get rid of Max. Knowing this, he tried to get to Max first to warn him, but he was too late. He saw the whole thing. He saw Shaw pull the trigger and throw the gun away. Gary retrieved the gun and ran away.

Seagal now plans to go see Shaw. He is pissed at Gary for not telling him earlier, but Gary says he was afraid Shaw would kill his family. I mean, that’s a fair concern. Back at Winston’s, Seagal arms up to go get that fuckin’ twerp Shaw. He’s got like 40 guns and grenades and bullets and shit on the table. Alice says that all this looks like revenge to her. Seagal, in the most nonchalant way possible, says, “Yeah, that’s what this is, revenge.” and keeps loading up his guns. She then says this will never end to which Seagal basically says he doesn’t give a fuck. When she says he’s as bad as the gangsters are, he says he’s a whole lot fucking worse.

The scene just… ends right there. Yeah, Seagal is a fucking monster and he doesn’t care if his revenge gets other people killed, he’s getting his and everyone else can eat his dick (but not his Big Mac at the next-door McDonald’s, that’s his and his alone).

Elsewhere, Shaw and Tucker meet with a prospective buyer from New York to unload the cocaine they took in that deal. When the buyer tests the cocaine, it turns out to be baking soda. Outside, Seagal starts to attack to finish his whole revenge plan. Basically, Shaw and Tucker get rid of the New York guys and then prepare for Seagal to come for them. One by one, Seagal wipes out the East Side Gangsters and dirty cops.

Seagal and Shaw find each other and both happen to run out of bullets. So it’s hand-to-hand combat for these two. This has Shaw at a great disadvantage because Seagal, even in his lazy period, is still an Aikido master. However, I think Aikido is not much of an offensive practice and is more for defense and reaction, but I could be wrong. While I do like this final fight scene because it kind of shows Seagal’s character’s more cool and calmer persona in these situations and Shaw has shown to be kind of more uptight and reactionary, it does also tend to show one of the bigger problems people have with Seagal’s hand-to-hand fighting scenes. It really is more of bad guys approach him and he slaps them away or moves away and redirects their motions and stuff. It comes off as more annoying or lazy than it does your typical martial arts scenes where someone like Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris is coming in hot and ready to punch you in the fucking face instantly.

When Tucker gets to the room, Shaw begs for him to kill Seagal, but Seagal slowly breaks Shaw’s neck. So now it seems as though Seagal’s at a disadvantage because he has no gun. He quickly takes the gun out of Tucker’s hand and says that he came here to do the thing he came here to do. He succeeded in killing the man who killed his son, so he has no beef with Tucker. He gives the gun back to him and walks away.

You know what? On a basic, cheap action film level, Urban Justice is actually kind of entertaining. Sure, there are dumb things in it like all the access to stuff that Seagal has to fight this war against a gang and dirty cops and the portrayal of the East Side Gangsters being pretty cartoonish, but the movie as a whole can be enjoyable more often than it is not. I knew going into this movie this was the one that was given some leeway on being entertaining by critics and by the score on IMDb, so I’m glad it does kind of ring true. It’s miles ahead of Attack Force, and I’m sure it’s going to be miles ahead of the other two films I have to cover this month.

The biggest shock is that, if you look at my tally board for the month, NO additions were made to it. We’re still at 3 strip club scenes and 43 badly overdubbed lines of dialog. I did not see any obvious usage of body doubles in an inappropriate way despite the troubles between the director and star. Urban Justice proved to be a much more serious film than what you might expect from late-era Steven Seagal.

I have a feeling, though, that next week, we’re going to start seeing those totals shift and rise throughout each category. If the mid-00s were late-era Steven Seagal, then the 2010s and beyond can be called late-late-era Steven Seagal, or possibly even joke-era Steven Seagal. The last two movies for the month are part of the time in which he’s cranking out these REALLY bad movies and his level of care and effort put into them wane massively.

It all starts next week with 2016’s Contract to Kill, so be sure to be here in seven days to read all about it.