On Deadly Ground

On Deadly Ground is a 1994 action film, directed by and starring Steven Seagal. It remains Seagal's only official directing credit to date.

Plot
Oil rig expert Forrest Taft discovers that the new refinery being built by his employers, Aegis Oil, is dangerously unsafe. When he voices his concerns, the company's CEO attempts to have him murdered. However, an Inuit tribe finds Taft and nurses him back to health, whereupon he decides that the only way to deal with his former employers is to blow up the refinery.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) Taft is an extremely unlikeable hero, and comes across as a violent, self-centred jerk. He's also a blatant Garry Stu (a theme in most of Seagal's movies) who is absolutely beloved by everyone except the bad guys, has godlike fighting abilities, and doesn't even take a single scratch outside of an early scene where the villains try to blow him up. What's more, Seagal apparently decided that the filmed footage didn't show him in a positive enough light, and had dialogue singing even more of his praises dubbed onto the film's various crowd scenes.
 * 2) Steven Seagal does a terrible job as both a director and lead actor.
 * 3) The villains are written in a way that makes them completely cartoonish and unbelievable, especially lead villain Jennings, played by Michael Caine.
 * 4) The film's pro-environmental message is handled without the slightest hint of subtlety, and frequently crosses the line into outright lecturing the viewer.
 * 5) Early on there's a completely gratuitous scene where some of the bad guys torture, mutilate and eventually kill Taft's friend.
 * 6) The film tries to pass off Asian-American actors as Inuit, which becomes really obvious in any scene featuring said actors and actual Inuit extras.
 * 7) Bizarre dream sequence when Taft undergoes a spiritual awakening, which causes the pace to lag.
 * 8) The main love interest is largely pointless and uninteresting character.
 * 9) The film seems to forget who killed the love interest's father. While this was actually done by John C. McGinley's character, MacGruder, the rest of the film acts as though Jennings was responsible, even though he never met the father and didn't order his death.
 * 10) Taft decides to stop the refinery from causing an environmental disaster by blowing it up. Which, if anything, would make the disaster even worse. The love interest even points out that they have enough evidence to get the refinery shut down by the EPA, but Taft blows this off as not being a strong enough solution.
 * 11) *This also means that Taft, the supposed hero, is actually guilty of more crimes than any of the movie's villains, with the possible exception of MacGruder.
 * 12) The main villain's secretary gets a pointlessly cruel and nasty death sequence where she's horribly injured in a car crash, set alight, and then blown up. Note that the worst thing she'd done until this point was call Alaska a third world country, which just makes her stupid, not evil.
 * 13) The film ends with a long pro-environmental speech delivered by Taft, half of which is just stating the obvious, and the other half of which is completely factually incorrect. Note that the version that Seagal filmed was five times longer, but the studio stepped in and forced him to cut it down.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Good performances by the actors (Michael Caine, John C. Mcginley, Billy Bob Thornton and R. Lee Ermey) playing the four main villains.
 * 2) Some of the action sequences are quite decent.
 * 3) Nice Alaskan location filming.
 * 4) Good score from the late Basil Poledouris.
 * 5) Despite the film's serious tone, it has many unintentionally funny moments.

Reception
The film got poor reviews, with criticism mostly focused on the film's excessive violence, Seagal's acting and directing, and the ending monologue. It did poorly at the box-office, only making $38 million on a $50 million budget.

Awards and nominations
On Deadly Ground was nominated for several Razzie awards. It managed to have Seagal win the award for Worst Director.

Trivia

 * Foreign releases of the film cut most of the first torture scene, shortening it to just the bad guys starting to carry out their torture, which actually works a lot better.

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