Welcome to the final week of Steven Seagal Month here at B-Movie Enema.

Thank fucking Christ. Guys… I mean it. Sure, we’ve had some fun with week one’s Attack Force. That movie went through some crazy post-production rewrites. It’s a movie that was bad, but not the kind of shitty bad. I’d argue it’s not fun, but it’s got enough goofy stuff that makes it a halfway decent watch even though it sucks. Week the second was Urban Justice. That movie was, to my shame, enjoyable. I had a good time watching that movie. We don’t need to say much more there. Read that review. Last week’s Contract to Kill suuuuuucked. It was dumb. It was without any energy. It was a lot of Seagal mumbling, and, worse, it was boring.

Knowing Contract to Kill moved us from the 2000s to the 2010s, I knew we were going to be in some trouble. The closer you get to the present year, the shittier his movies get. That makes this week’s movie real dangerous waters for my personal desire to remain alive and breathing in this world. So, let’s talk about 2019’s General Commander.

First of all, let’s talk about that title. General Commander sounds super generic. Like, should we just call it Run of the Mill Leader? I admit, I chose this movie because the title made me chuckle. I saw that on Wikipedia and thought, “Oh yeah… That sure sounds super exciting.”

Anyway, the behind the scenes concept for Average Delegator is kind of surprising. For one, it was originally conceived to be a TV miniseries comprising of nine, 45-minute episodes. It was about a badass rogue organization that goes around stopping people from starting World War III. That actually doesn’t sound that bad of a concept. It’s a little G.I. Joe, isn’t it? To be honest, that isn’t a bad place for Seagal to be. He practically acts like a character from that cartoon. Another thing about this movie that makes it a little different than later era Seagal fair is that was shot in the Philippines, and not in Eastern Europe. While he was there shooting this movie, he did some post-production work and reshoots for another of his films, Attrition. The major surprise is that this film took NINE MONTHS to film.

Good god… Could you imagine that? Nine fucking months of working on a 2019 Steven Seagal movie. That sounds like pure hell. Does that give this movie a chance to be good? Well, maybe. I mean it’s possible that before I finish writing this review an African swallow could fly into my neighborhood, crash into my living room window, take a shit on my eyeballs, and then, as I scream about what’s happening, could crawl inside my mouth and eat my insides out. Chances aren’t good, but you can’t say there is zero chance.

All month, we’ve been playing a game with these movies to count the number of scenes in a strip club, how many times a stunt double was used in a scene that should not have required one (i.e. Seagal traversing up stairs), and how many times he mumbles incoherently or has a completely different guy ADR lines for him. It’s been a tad surprising that most of the numbers still come from Attack Force, but we’re nearing the end so there will be a final tally at the end of this review. Let’s get into Sorta Okay Manager to see how this month will conclude.

The credit sequence for this movie seems to make an attempt at a James Bond-style title sequence. It’s got each actor/actress with a vanity shot as their names kind of artistically show up next to them. Where you see the majority of the upper half of their body, there are other things going on from the movie within the outline of their bodies. It’s actually not too bad, but it does have an oddly television-ish look to it. It reminds me less of James Bond and more of a soap opera’s credits where it shows you all the characters that have something to do on the show.

Awesomely, they show a stripper in the opening credits so… chalk one up to the Strip Club Scene tally before the movie even begins.

We get some words against a black screen before the movie truly begins. It tells us something that is kind of depressing when you think about it. It says that about 25 people die each day waiting for an organ transplant. Each month, over 8,000 people get added to the organ wait list[sic]. Okay, as someone who lives alone (because of course I do), I live just comfortably enough to not be in bad shape financially. However, a medical situation could get real bad real fast for me. In the United States, healthcare is incredibly expensive when it doesn’t have to be. Any serious health issue could put me in danger with work and with the general quality of life from an earnings standpoint. It’s a thing I try not to think about too much because if I do, I either get depressed or am left lying in bed unable to sleep, frankly, or both. An organ transplant not being quickly available if I needed it nor being able to afford it as an American citizen scares the shit out of me.

Thanks, Steven Seagal. You already ruined my life by making me watch your stupid movies. Now I’m bummed out about healthcare options as a member of a capitalist society that doesn’t seem to care about other people in that society. This sucks.

So, how does that relate to anything that might happen in this movie? Well, the next card that comes up talks about how there’s a huge business for black market organ trade. It’s like a $2 billion business. A single heart could fetch a million bucks in the black market.

Speaking of a heart transplant, here’s a guy who probably will need one if he keeps up his current diet and lack of exercise – Steven Seagal. The movie opens with him in an interview with what I’m sure would be called an “uppity bitch” by him. He’s being asked if he killed someone he was sent after. He apparently resigned from the CIA, but this lady is telling him his boss will reinstate him if he just answers questions. He goes on and on about why he resigned. He’s disappointed in the country that he fought for and was willing to die for.

Some of his lines are repeated in editing like it’s the Zack Bagans opening to Ghost Adventures episodes.

I will give Seagal some credit. He’s not gruffly mumbling his lines. He’s speaking with clarity and with actual conviction. His lines suck, but his acting is doing what he can with the lines. Good for him. I guess he still gives a shit. But why is he upset about the CIA?

Two weeks earlier, he was on a mission with his team in Cambodia. He always has a team in these movies. He’s the fucking leader, but he always brings his buddies along with him. Anyway, one of his team members is an Australian fella who watches a girl walking down the street in a sexy red dress. Apparently, the team was looking for her. They spot her, follow her, and they get a ping on her phone to get GPS on her whereabouts. Where did she go? A strip club!

Of course she did. I’m actually relieved to see one of these fucking things in a Seagal movie. For a second, I was worried that I picked the wrong movies to represent this particular category in the tally.

In addition to the girl in the red dress, another girl, in a red leather jacket, has also shown up on her motorcycle. She is also part of the team watching the girl in the red dress go into Club Hello Fox, the strip club that Seagal is probably itching to get inside. The girl in the red dress is approached by a man who wants to buy some of that sweet sweet sex from her. While the girl drops something into the guy’s drink, Seagal tells him to take a pill, presumably to briefly counteract whatever she dropped in his drink.

When the guy passes out, she sends a text to a van full of guys who come into the room to harvest his organs. Seagal’s team closes in on the hotel to bust the dudes. I like that this is basically a Steven Seagal movie that is also playing on the urban legend of a guy meeting a girl, and then he wakes up with missing organs. I really hoped this fun dumb premise held up.

Okay, so we have two things going on here at once. As Seagal joins his team to raid the room where the one guy is about to get his shit harvested, the main bad guy of that black market organ thing, is getting a little spooked. He wants the driver of the van to get to his position and be ready to high-tail it the fuck out of there. When that guy moves, the girl on the motorcycle chases after him and eventually shoots that guy dead which causes him to wreck the van and it’s all some good ol’ fashioned car chase action stuff.

Meanwhile, Seagal and team are ambushing the main black market dudes. I think these guys are maybe Italian? Like, this is an American operation, in Cambodia, but trying to find Italian guys who are stealing and selling organs on the black market. That’s a wild triangle of weirdness. Let’s not forget one of the guys on Seagal’s team happens to be an Aussie. The mission goes sideways when the black market guy shoots and kills the guy who was about to get his shit harvested when he was using him as a hostage with Seagal and everyone pointing guns at him. I mean… What did they think would happen? Some people REALLY don’t want to be caught. Somebody other than the bad guy is gonna get shot more often than not I suspect.

So, that’s why this uppity bitch, Agent Thompson, is reaming the team. It’s why Seagal is mad. Seagal is gonna get his commission restored, but Thompson rails on one of the other members, Agent Sonia Dekker, because she had a relationship with the guy who got killed. She demands that Dekker tell her everything she knows about an arms dealer named Orsetti. I feel like there is some over-the-top woman-on-woman hatred going on here. Thompson seemed to almost cower from Seagal when he was on his high horse, but she’s aggressive with Dekker. Feels a little like old-school female bullshit where they want to just fucking hate each other rather than support and uplift each other.

Orsetti learns of the goings on in Cambodia and dispatches one of his guys to go speak to their man in the police. The cop has provided this man access to the girl in the red dress to find out anything he can about who did all the killing of the people in that hotel. The cop says that whoever did it were professionals…

Oh, you mean like the fucking Central Intelligence Agency? Yeah, those guys are probably gonna be pretty good at making death look real professional. Here’s another situation where Seagal is playing a government agent, but is talked about or treated like an assassin instead. He loves trying to have this both ways… Like his Whoppers… with cheese and without cheese.

But whatever. I really need to flip the Shit Switch in my brain because these movies aren’t going to get any better. Seagal is both a badass CIA agent and a badass stone cold killer.

This guy, Santino, gets access to the girl. He says that everything is going to be okay. Oh, he does work for Orsetti and he does have a picture of her mother on his phone, but everything is gonna be juuuuust fine. He tells her to swallow a pill and her mother is fine. The pill is cyanide and she agrees she’ll take one for her mom.

In Bangkok, Agent Thompson arrives to tell Seagal’s team that they are being reassigned and disbanded. She says the Southeast Asian branch is getting restructured. There won’t be room for cowboys anymore like them. Things are going to be much more “corporate” from now on.

So… a couple things. First, maybe it’s a good idea to toss out the cowboys, right? One of their team is dead. Considering this is just a situation in which this was an organ harvester that killed their teammate, it would seem as though they have faced much, much worse in their time as agents and on the same team. That makes me wonder how many of their teammates have died on missions with those much, much worse threats? These guys probably should have been disbanded a long time ago. Second, corporate? What the fuck does that mean in terms of the CIA? Less Aussies and t-shirts and more suits and ties? That doesn’t make any sense.

When the team questions whether or not they should accept their orders (in front of the person issuing the orders I might add), they talk about how they will lose all the information and all the intel they’ve pieced together on Orsetti. Thompson says they don’t actually possess that information because it belongs to the “company” now. Is this how the CIA is referred to generally? I understand a “company” of soldiers. I’ve heard of that. I’ve never heard that applied to agents. There are stations. There are agencies. There are departments. I’ve never heard of an agency referring to itself as a company or as being corporate. Can someone explain that to me?

Right, right, right… flip the Shit Switch.

Thompson says that those who don’t want to be rogue and actually follow their orders can accompany her to a plane tomorrow morning and they’ll fly back to Langley where they will be retrained and reassigned to new teams separately. Dekker says she can shove that up her ass. She’s going after Orsetti with or without the rest of the team. Considering Thompson is issuing orders here, that’s a pretty bold strategy to simply flat-out disobey direct orders.

This leads to everyone having their moment to say their piece. Motorcycle girl, Agent Lopez, says Asia is her home and she’s not leaving. The younger American dude on the team, Harrison, folds like a bitch and promises to be at the airport tomorrow morning to get reassigned. Agent Rosen, a girl who mostly acts as the eye in the sky in the team van and directs people via radio, says if they leave, then that one dude’s death means nothing. The Aussie, Agent Benton, says he’ll do whatever Seagal does. Guess what Seagal does.

Yeah, the movie ain’t 30 minutes long. Of course he decides to do an insubordination. Each of the members of the team deals with what they’ve been told and what happened to their friend in their own way. Dekker is balling her eyes out and wants to get drunk. Benton walks around the streets of Bangkok aimlessly. Lopez goes to a church in Manilla to pray over a decision and confesses to the father there that she killed a guy. Rosen goes to talk to Dekker. Harrison punches a bag. We don’t see Seagal so either they didn’t have him that day to film that scene or he’s pounding boneless wings by the dozens at the local BW3.

Either thing is possible when it comes to Seagal.

For a movie that took nine whole months to shoot, I’m starting to get serious Sniper vibes here. When we get to Rosen and Dekker’s conversation about the dead guy, and then follow that up straight away with Benton and Harrison talking about what they should do to get past what happened, Seagal just isn’t here. These are all important scenes. This team is disbanded. These people lost a close friend, and, for Dekker, a lover. Seagal should be here to dish out uplifting dialog to pull his team back together. Instead, he’s off… somewhere (I’m guessing the aforementioned pounding wings suggestion). The movie is nearing its halfway point and Seagal had that monologue at the beginning and then had that scene where they had to raid that organ harvesting thing. In the scene where he’s told his team is no more and he’s practically out of a job, he’s just sitting in a chair looking forlorn. The scene ends with him calling someone to say he’s not going to be somewhere for a couple weeks.

I guess that’s him making his stand, but these are important character moments that he’s just not here for. What kind of leader is he? Benton says that he did something great for Harrison when he was trying to smarten him up to join the rest of the team. However, we don’t see him doing anything great. He led a mission that got a team member killed. That’s all we’ve actually seen him do. He’s just not present in this movie whatsoever.

The character this movie should be about is Lopez. She’s only had a couple scenes, but she’s got the best chance of actually being a character with a shot at being three-dimensional. Rosen/Dekker are the older women characters who seem to kind of bury their pain and drink over it when it bubbles up. Harrison/Benton are just machismo characters from two different generations. Nothing terribly interesting about those two guys other than one is from Australia. Seagal is nowhere to be seen.

However, Lopez, played by the beautiful Mica Javier… She’s got something to her. When she showed up, she made a statement. She had that motorcycle and the red leather jacket and she was glaring daggers into everything. The one guy tried to pick her up, so she kicked him in the balls. That’s always fun. She chased down the guy in the van and straight-up murdered him out of some sort of anger. Then, we see her at the cathedral looking for forgiveness for that murder. She talks about how she is out there trying to do the right thing every day but she worries she’s losing herself to the darkness she’s fighting. There’s something there to that idea. When the padre gives her something to chew over, she goes outside and immediately kicks the shit out of a dude being a little too rough to a woman. She’s got anger issues. She’s got an attitude that might have something to explore.

This should be her movie.

The next morning, to no one’s surprise, none of the agents reported to return to Virginia for reassignment. Seagal has gone to Hong Kong to meet up with a very rich blonde European lady. He turned down a job with the woman to lead a security company for her. He’s returned to ask for funding to start up a company for him. His angle is to get the funding to have his former CIA team operate to bring down Orsetti and basically become an independent team of good guys. Think of them as a Justice… Lea… OR a Justice Societ… They’re gonna be Superfriends is what I’m getting at.

This scene is kind of weird for one specific reason. The scene itself is fine. He’s going to someone he trusts and getting his team money and opportunity to catch the guys who killed their buddy and he’s the one needing the assistance. Of course, the woman rolls over and tells of some sort of story from their past about how he saved her life or something, but that’s fine. His dialog does sound like him, but I’m going to dock this five points on the mumbles and voice double category because he sounds off. It’s probably been looped in but it doesn’t sound like it really should with how he looks. And it’s a specific series of lines. Not all of them sound off, but some do. Not sure if there was a rewrite or what, but anyway.

Alexander interrogates Harrison trying to find Seagal. She keeps just asking the same question over and over – “WHERE IS ALEXANDER?!?” When he doesn’t answer, then there is a voiceover about how he’s lying to her and it looks like she’s psychically telling him he’s lying to her. It’s kind of hilarious. But the scene is like two minutes of her asking over and over where Seagal is and then her thinking really hard at him about how he’s a liar. It’s something that caught me off guard as really funny. It’s also obvious these interrogation scenes with Alexander were probably shoved into a movie that needed to get to its 85-minute runtime. If they are playing off the original idea of this being a rogue organization of agents saving the world and shit, it does add some fire to the idea that the toughest of the tough, Seagal, is missing, and that concerns the CIA a great deal.

Orsetti is pretty upsetty over his guys being killed and he’s talking about it over some spaghetti with the cop in Cambodia who is leading up the investigation. Orsetti has Santino slit the cop’s throat because he’s getting no answers about whoever killed his men. That probably won’t help. He had a cop he could work with. Now he has no cop to work with to find Seagal and his team.

Meanwhile, some guy with a goatee calls a guy who was out for a morning jog about someone being in Bangkok and it’s now or never to deal with him. The “him” is Seagal. Who this guy is, I could not tell you. I know that he goes to a garage where Seagal just happens to show up and they tussle for, like, 30 seconds. Seagal disarms the guy and then shoots him in the head. Seagal then calls the guy who sent this dude after him and he tells him that if he tries to send another person after him, he’ll kill him, his family, and his fuckin’ dog.

It would not surprise me one bit if this shit does not connect at all to the rest of the movie. It’s just a scene added to give Seagal something to do since he’s been in so little of the first half of the movie. It will later connect, but one of the problems with this movie is that it jumps around from city to city, country to country at a kind of break-neck pace. The movie started in Cambodia, but the CIA operated out of Bangkok, Thailand. Lopez is from the Philippines so she went there. The money for Seagal’s “security company” was in Hong Kong. A member of his team is Australian. Speaking of Benton, he called a guy in Spain to get a meeting with Orsetti to sell him on a product/service that might be of use to the mob boss. The movie is scatterbrained so it would make sense for it to just toss in that assassination attempt on Seagal for shits and giggles because who really cares about it any semblance of a coherent plot anyway?

Seagal assembles his team of Avenge… no his Fantastic F… no… his Paw Patrol to tell them what their mission is. Seagal called his security company “General Commander”… *snicker* Come on, man. That’s the worst name for a company I’ve ever heard of. They’re sitting in a board room and they have these screens against the wall. The General Commander logo is spinning on the screens. They not only got a company set up, but they also got this board room, these screens, and they got someone to design a logo for them? That’s so stupid.

Anyway, Rosen gives everyone an education about the dark web. Basically, it’s how Orsetti does his mob shit. He sells drugs, guns, and organs and it’s all untraceable because he uses 4chan or something. Anyway, Seagal says he and Benton are going to be able to do what dumb computer nerds like Rosen can’t do and pick up the Orsetti trail again by actually meeting with someone who will get them connected.

I want to say there are, like, 30 minutes remaining in this movie? They have to 1) find Orsetti, 2) kill Orsetti, 3) profit? Instead of really ramping up for an exciting climax, we follow Lopez who has gone home to visit her family. It turns out the priest she visited earlier is her literal brother. That would have been better to know earlier instead of just seeing that he’s at the dinner table with Lopez and her parents. Again, Lopez turns out to be the most interesting character with family struggles and her mother wanting her to stay home and not return to work, etc. The decision to do this in the final act as the movie should be ramping up to some action and excitement? That’s questionable as fuck.

Then again, maybe that’s one of the biggest issues with the movie itself. There are so many characters in this movie. We have Seagal’s team which consists of six people. That’s a lot of people. If you want to flesh any of them out, you need to take some time to do so. Considering the movie is only 85 minutes long, you really gotta work fast or not really do it at all. It’s possible to make most of these characters fairly thin and have it all still work. However, there are legitimate scenes of interpersonal drama in this movie. That’s tough for a movie like this. You have to shoehorn in a scene of Seagal stopping an assassination attempt on his own life to give him something to do. You are trying to build this really sympathetic character that is Lopez, but you can’t really give her too much time or it could sink a lot of other action and tension stuff in the movie. It’s one of those movies that just tells you to give a shit about a bunch of characters and expects you to do so. But if you try to hold any of it up to scrutiny and try to figure out unique characteristics for any of the characters, you aren’t going to be able to actually do so – aside from Lopez.

Okay, so the entire climax of this movie is dependent on whether or not this meeting takes place that the guy from Spain has set up for the General *snicker* Commander team to get in and get the information about where or how they can find Orsetti. I think. I think that’s the plan. The thing is, the guy they are supposed to meet, according to the dude from Spain, is unpredictable. That means there is no guarantee that they will meet with the guy at all. So, great. All our heroes’ hopes are pinned on this guy deciding to do the meeting and not be a flake. Swell.

They do get information about where to go. Dekker and the guy from Spain get a call from Santino who tells them where to go to meet Orsetti. For some reason, the team can’t move on Orsetti until Dekker completes this transaction for an organ. Why? General Commander is not necessarily an official organization that works for a specific nation. It’s not like they can’t just fuckin’ kill an international criminal. This is a movie. Just, like, fucking shoot Orsetti.

There’s a larger issue at play, though. Orsetti shows that he actually has a live body in the warehouse where the deal is going down. This forces the team to have to act in a different way. Dekker and the Spaniard create a distraction that gets the Spaniard killed. It takes three guys to kill Santino and the rest of the team starts to go to work, but Orsetti takes Dekker hostage. It’s another standoff with a gun pointed at the head of one of Seagal’s team members.

Seagal’s PTSD from the other guy getting killed causes him to hesitate and he doesn’t give Benton the okay to take a shot. Orsetti and a goon escape with Dekker as their hostage. Lopez kills the goon driving the car and Dekker jumps out. Harrison shoots out the tires causing Orsetti to crash his car. Before Harrison, Benton, or Seagal can get to Orsetti, a helicopter flies in and starts shooting at the good guys.

Why, you might add? Well… It’s so Benton can grab a fuckin’ bazooka and blow that son of a bitch out of the sky! His one-liner? “Merry Christmas, Motherfucker!” Uh… Okay! I’ll allow it. A bazooka just made an appearance. To honor that, I will accept any ol’ one-liner the guy shooting the bazooka has.

Harrison uses his assault rifle to blow up Orsetti’s car. That leaves Seagal to deal with Orsetti, mano y mano… with fucking giant knives. This movie went from 0 to 60 with warp speed.

Why would Seagal bring that knife to this showdown? I dunno, but both guys thought to do so. That’s brilliant! Like any Seagal action scene, it only lasts about 30 seconds as there are a couple swipes at each other and then he stabs Orsetti in the throat with his knife.

Seagal goes to a small town in the Philippines to meet up with his lady love. Guess what… She’s NOT decades younger than he is. That’s shocking. Anyway, Thompson wants to know where he’s gone off to, but none of the team will tell her. In fact, they likely don’t even know where he is as it seems he’s gone deep underground where he has that little home with the Filippino lady.

So, get this… That guy who ordered the assassination of Seagal earlier in the movie? He’s a CIA agent – like a boss-level CIA agent. I had to actually look that shit up on Wikipedia. Yeah, he wanted Seagal dead because of his team’s action against Orsetti. It’s basically illegal, so, as they are wont to do, the CIA decided to police that shit. To, I dunno, punish Seagal or get back at him for killing Orsetti, an international criminal and generally bad guy, that CIA honcho dude ordered a drone strike that drops a fucking missile onto Seagal and his lady love’s fucking head.

THE. END.

Eat your heart out, Executive Decision. Seagal got a missile dropped on his head in this one. It’s kind of unbelievable this is how they ended this movie. Then again, it’s not entirely like Seagal was really super important to this movie. I mean, the rest of the team seemingly were more interesting characters. That comment, itself, is a little bit of a stretch for everyone except Lopez.

The credits play with a very James Bond-like theme song that really does make me think of what I said earlier about the credits. Was this really an attempt to make something that could at least resemble something that Daniel Craig was doing as Bond? Maybe. Interestingly, you could, for once, say Bond ripped Seagal off as No Time to Die dropped a missile on Bond’s noggin years after General Commander did it to Seagal.

Is this a bad movie? Oh yes. However, it’s easily the second-best of the bunch this month. Maybe it’s because my brain has been turned to mashed potatoes with a Steven Seagal amount of gravy poured over them. However, there aren’t that many Seagal-isms that tanked other movies like Contract to Kill or Attack Force. It would be interesting if this was a series or a miniseries because then you could have done a lot with all these characters. In the end, a series could earn that ending of Seagal and his lover being bombed to oblivion by a vengeful CIA honcho.

One more thing about that theme song at the end of the movie. That was performed by Mica Javier. So not only could she sing, but she played the best character in the whole movie. This almost comes off as a vehicle for her. She’s mostly played in these low-budget garbage flicks. In fact, her most recent movie found her in the Asylum Transmorphers movie that tied into Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

For our tally, we get to add two more ticks to the Strip Club category as it appeared both in the opening credits and in the film itself. Plus, I counted about eight instances of wonky overdubbing. I don’t want to say he mumbled, because he didn’t in any way that was more than usual, and I don’t want to call it voice doubling, but it sounded odd to my ears. That brings the totals to what we see below.

The tally thing, like so many post-Taco Bell dinner activities at the Seagal household, kind of landed like a wet sloppy turd, but it was something more I could do to stay engaged with this month’s shitfest movies. Still, it’s amazing how this guy still can be someone who is considered a viable star for an action movie. I mean, sure, he’s not raking in the cash he did in the 80s and first half of the 90s. However, I’m sure there are guys aged 50 to about 70 who look forward to these movies when they show up on Amazon Prime Video. He’s still got a base of fans… somehow.

But allow me to say that I am just elated that I survived this month. I get to move on to greater and greener pastures. I have a couple sequels recently released by Vinegar Syndrome that I want to dive into starting next week. Join me then as I get booked into Amazon Jail.

Until then, look for me and Steven Seagal in the corner booth at the world’s first-ever strip club that serves McDonald’s Big Macs and buckets of fried chicken. In fact, we’ll save you a spot to join us.