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Marked for Death (1990)

Dir: Dwight H. Little

After sting operation goes wrong and his partner is killed, hard man DEA agent John Hatcher (Steven Seagal) goes off to confessional to lay down his sins and his torments in a puke inducing speech.
"Try to find the gentle self inside you" declares the boring old Priest and so Hatcher decides he has indeed had enough of all the guns, drugs and general mayhem and so quits the DEA and goes to visit his Sister and her family.

"Try to find the gentle self inside you"? To hell with that Padre, leave the gentleness to Ben!
We want oodles of violence dished out to low life perps! Come on Stevie, get with the ass-kicking programme!

This does not look good for action junkies I hear you say…But low! Ass kicking is back on the agenda when it turns out we have a gang of crazy-ass, murderous Jamaican drug dealers in his Sister’s neighbourhood!
So sure enough Stevie the Seagul has to flap his manly wings once more and shit some justice onto the dreadlocked heads of these drug dealing creeps!...

 

Seagal’s third feature outing is perhaps his most brutal, but lacks the freshness of his debut “Above the Law” and the pace and sheer entertainment value of his next film, “Out for Justice”.
But it’s certainly a step up from the previous “Hard to Kill”.

A big plus with “Marked for Death” is that we have a full-on theatrical villain! Something seriously lacking in “Hard to Kill”.
Here the bad guy is a whacked-out, voodoo practising, Babylon grooving, Jamaican psycho of the most deranged order, lovingly named 'Screwface' (Basil Wallace, having a furiously good time).

‘Screwface and his gang also bring up a pretty unique aspect to any American action film…that of Jamaican bad guys. And screen writers Michael Grais and Mark Victor certainly make the most of this Jamaican twist.
We are treated to a cheesy (Bacardi fuelled) Voodoo ceremony, mystical naked milk bathing, upside down chickens, human sacrifice, delightfully theatrical Jamaican accents and dialect, strategically placed pot smoking, blaring reggae and gangsters dressed up in lots of gold chains with little round sunglasses , rampant dreadlocks, and Bob Marley beards! Righteous, mon!

Seagal is basically Seagal although his character (despite the one-liners) is a bit more serious here than in “Above the Law” and certainly in “Out for Justice”. As such, without a bit of knowing mirth to his scenes, Seagal is rather more ‘woody’ than usual when not kicking ass. Luckily though, he kicks a lot of ass and handles all the action (as always in these early films) perfectly.

Away from Stevie the Seagul Director Dwight H. Little also re-teams with the talented Danielle Harris (who played the ill-fated Jamie in Little‘s “Halloween 4” two years earlier) as Seagal’s niece, but disgracefully gives her only one line of dialogue and the rest of the cast includes a mixed bag of faces including that chainsaw-wielding Columbian guy from “Scarface”, that stupid psychiatrist from “The Terminator” flicks, that woman in “Coming to America” who Eddie Murphy fell for with a dodgy Jamaican accent, and the prolific Keith David (from “They Live” and “The Thing”) as Hatcher’s old buddy, sidekick.

Action! Where be it? I hear you squawk!
Well, we have lots of action that’s for sure (and some titties, I might add). So don’t you worry dear reader. Here is the roll call:
We have some good stunt work (including a great header out of a window), a furious car chase/shootout (with some of that essential ‘sidewalk café’ destruction) which leads into one of many effective martial arts slap-downs (with lots of that Seagal mainstay ‘the nasty as hell bone snapping scenes that leave grotesquely flopping limbs’, as well as some totally gratuitous glass display-case smashing), gratuitous side-of-beef destruction, lots of machine guns, a sword to the testicles, a decapitation, manly shrugging off of wounds followed by heroic limping, hammer-fu, a sword duel, wanton beer bottle destruction and eyeball vandalism!
So all is good!
We do have to suffer the ‘super villain mistake #1’ though (that of not simply killing your nemesis when you have the chance) and here it’s even worse as it happens twice! James Bond would be proud!

Non-action highlights are sadly few and far between though but we do have a Mafioso guy dressed in a tiny black silk posing pouch! Once seen, never forgotten…the nightmares will follow!
And as it’s a Seagal flick we do have some fun dialogue to enjoy thankfully, and classics like the following are a rope to a drowning man as far as getting some entertainment from “Marked for Death” when the action is absent.
Goon: “I’m fucking ‘Jimmy Fingers’, I’m a made fucking man”!
Hatcher: “Oh yeah“? *blam* “God made men”.
And hard-ass insults like this are the only things that give hatcher any actual personality;
Hatcher: “I know you’re a scumbag and a puke, I don’t mind that. You give me what I need and I leave here a nice guy. You don’t, I’m gonna fuck you up”.

So overall “Marked for Death” is very flat in-between the action scenes, with only the dialogue and ‘Screwface’ and the voodoo Jamaicans keeping the entertainment level from dipping too far, but luckily there is more than enough action, destruction and limb snapping to keep us all happy.