THE GLIMMER MAN (1996)

I remember when the trailers for this film came out.  It looked like it was going to be a departure for Big Black Steve; a buddy movie.  Him taking some grief from Keenen Ivory Wayans, Keenen and Steven laughing in the squad car.  Oh, sure, you expected Seagal to have most of the fight scenes, but just his plodding self-satisfied bully act would have to develop into something else.  Because somebody else was on the screen.  Right?  Right?

The Glimmer Man, no matter how it presents itself as a buddy movie, a comedy, or whatever, is another gruelling Steven Seagal movie.  Seagal movies for me are notable for, above all, their solid lack of suspense.  Any tension in a Steven Seagal movie comes from me worrying about how badly he's going to brutalize the people he's fighting.  I remember him breaking some guy's arm in three places in Marked for Death.  It was the only thing that got any response from me (well, that and the scene where Seagal tests out a silenced assault rifle by shooting up a side of meat.  The way the editor cuts back and forth between the expressionless side of meat and the expressionless side of Seagal struck me later as some hidden form of commentary about big Steve).  In The Glimmer Man, Seagal, looking even more like a glazed ham than ever, wrecks a restaurant, slaps a snotty maitre'd silly, pistolwhips two guys from the backseat of a car, shoots a serial killer in church (to be fair, the serial killer was literally asking for it), gets information by shooting someone in the hand and foot, commits hostage negotiations with a frenzied parochial school youth by saying " We both want the same thing; I don't want to kill you and you don't want to be dead," and, after setting up the chief bad guy and his main triggerman into a distrustful showdown, goes into that mexican standoff with guns blazing while admitting that he doesn't have to.

Seagal's loving commitment to brutality isn't the only hallmark of his films.  As in Above the Law, Marked for Death and Out for Justice, Seagal has a loving wife and kid who are threatened in the course of events (usually giving the wife a chance to have a tearful sequence where she worries about Seagal of all people).  There's also the 14 second commitment to peace that Seagal has his character espouse before brutalizing everyone.  There's Seagal humbly accepting his suspension by flipping his badge into a urinal for his commanding officer to extricate (a move he doesn't use in other movies but is wonderfully emblematic of his roles as police officer).  This scene literally occurs after Seagal takes a polygraph test in which the examiner says "Oh, sure, maybe he could beat it, but he would have to have complete control of his emotions."  And there's the endless scenes of people going "who is this guy?" and somehow, someone always gets ahold of Seagal's file and finds that he's some sort of unbelievable black op fighter guy who fought for the government in dirty covert actions and is now living a more sedate life, usually as a brutality inflicting police officer.  Because Seagal doesn't deign to do pain, his final fight showdowns are unbelievably undramatic and this one, in which Seagal and Wayans both hunt down one guy, produced even more yawns than usual.

This movie has some cool stuff in it; nice shots of seedy L.A., many rainswept streets, an amusingly fraudulent serial killer called the Family Man who crucifies couples and draws childish religious tableuas in blood on the walls.  In other words, Seven (or, god help us, Se7en as the IMDB has it) came out the year this was in production and the director and/or producer wanted this to kind of look like that.  Wayans as the buddy is remarkably unfunny in that anything amusing he says ended up in the trailer.  But he is likeable, though, and his fight scene did have tension to it, despite the fact that he and his assailant knock over the TV starting a blaze, spill bottles of liquor and tip the oven off the gas line, thus causing Keenen to have to do the old run and jump from a fireball action guy routine. In short, Wayans comes away from the whole thing unsullied, although I still think trying to become an action hero after starring in a spoof of action hero movies (to say nothing of those In Living Color sketches) is a really bad career move.

Seagal and Van Damme aren't even getting domestic theater releases for their next movies; straight to cable and video they go.  Considering they both knew that they were supposed to make the Schwartenegger switch a long time ago (make movies that are self-parodies, then make comedies where they parody their image, then make comedies once every other year.  Technically, it didn't really work for Schwartzenegger all that well, but he made enough large successes to get 25 million to play Mr. Freeze) and kept making the same old movies while marketing them as something different makes it hard to feel sorry for them.  With The Glimmer Man, Seagal has produced an amazing hybrid; a comedy action thriller that is none of the above.  My brother once made a compelling argument for the slasher movies of the 80's as dadaist art.  Seagal, in a similar tradition, has produced an amazing body of anti-cinema that is resolutely anti-life and anti-hope.  It's too bad someone like Antonin Artaud isn't around to admire it.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a really boring low budget artsy female assassin movie to get back to.

More about this movie

I looked to see if others shared my loathing for the big guy.  The Result?  The Steven Seagal Crossword Puzzle

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All written material on these pages is © 1998 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.