Reviews

First of all, let me just mention the fact that I have not yet had the chance to see the Mark Whalberg movie – Shooter. The Contractor and Shooter are, at least on paper, almost the same movie. A hit-man is given one important assignment, to kill someone very important, he does the job and then finds out he was set up by the very people that hired him.

So, Wesley Snipes has not been in a good movie since...well since Blade 2 if you ask me. His DTV career led to him making his worst movie – The Marksman. After that low point I had not expected him to make another decent movie for a very long time, I half expected him to follow in Steven Seagal's steps and keep making awful DTV movie after awful DTV movie.

With The Contractor, I was proved wrong. The movie has nothing original in it. You've seen it all before and done better, but what it does is something more DTV movies should do: it keeps the story simple and clear, it has interesting and well developed characters, it has some nice locations, it has a pretty good soundtrack and it has some talented actors. The director was OK, nothing special, but unlike most DTV directors, he manages to actually direct coherently and pretty well. The Contractor is more of an action thriller, it has a quite low action quotient, but we do get some nice shootouts, nothing special, a pretty cool fight scene, but the thing that keeps the movie going is a nice and clear and very well told story that, despite being completely predictable, it works because it follows the formula in a very relaxed manner, it just does its job effortlessly and that is the best thing about the entire movie.

The movie does what it sets out to do, to be an entertaining action movie and it does it quite well. The cinematography is nice, the music is good, the acting is very good (although no awards will be handed out) and the pace is nice and relaxed, not too slow, not too fast.

The Contractor is a competent action thriller that had it received more attention it could have and should have been a Cinema movie. It just did not have a big enough budget to be a Cinema movie and that shows in the action scenes, they are not bad, just too simplistic and minimalistic and not through intent, rather through a lack of money to do anything bigger. There is one actress in the movie, the young girl, who really stands out and impressed me and that is quite unexpected in such a movie. Snipes genuinely seems interested in the movie and in the material and although he clearly is not at the level we've seen him before (his career is full of examples of fine acting) he puts just the right amount of effort into the movie.

Overall, the best movie Snipes has done in quite a while, a nice action movie that is definitely worth seeing and perhaps the first step towards bigger and better things for him.

Definitely one of the best DTV action movies out there. Snipes has managed to reach the level of quality we're used to seeing from him and this movie is on par with the action movies put out in recent years by Jean Claude Van Damme (Replicant, In Hell, Wake of Death, The Hard Corps, Until Death – all above average action movies) and Dolph Lundgren (The Defender and The Mechanik).

The first twenty to thirty minutes of this movie are better than anything Seagal has made since Exit Wounds. Really good stuff that with a little bit more polishing could have been just as good as anything in all of his pre-DTV days. The most annoying thing in these 20-30 minutes is the voice dubbing. This time, I can say, hand-on-heart that it most definitely is NOT Steven's fault, it just seems that getting a Seagal impersonator to "sound" like Seagal (at least to try to) is cheaper than getting Seagal himself to do ADR work in the sound studio. Other minor issues in this first part of the movie are all down to the director's ability to…direct. Everything on-screen oozes presence, fun and involvement. Seagal seems happy to be in this movie and actually looks like he cares about the movie, the music is not that bad, the acting overall is OK, the plot seems to start going in an interesting direction, etc. This is a huge step forward when compared to recent Seagal movies like Mercenary for Justice or Black Dawn.

Steven Seagal's movies have not made the same step towards quality like the ones from Van Damme and Lundgren have. Since Half Past Dead his movies have been un-engaging, poorly directed, badly edited and badly acted. The action side of all of his DTV movies has been a HUGE letdown and disappointment

Seagal seems to just not care. He is out of shape and while that would not bother me since the martial arts that he specializes is are not about brute force, but about using the enemy's force and weight against themselves, I am bothered by the fact the producers AND Seagal himself are trying to hide this by only filming Seagal from certain angles or in a dark room to try to hide the extra weight. Seagal ends up looking ridiculous and is almost unseen in his movies. He also looks sweaty and dirty even if he is just having a conversation. The overweight factor is incompatible with the mean, bad tough guy persona Seagal has had in all of his movies.

Also, he has been wearing the same ugly long leather coat in 90% of his DTV movies starting with The Foreigner. It looks bad on him and only serves the purpose of hiding his extra weight. Also, it looks silly when Seagal wears that type of coat during summer, winter, autumn, underwater, on a plane, during a fight, during a shootout, all that remains is to see him wearing that coat during a sex scene.

That same coat makes a comeback in the second half of Shadow Man. Boy, does it look bad.

Remember that I said that the first 20 to 30 minutes of Shadow Man are quite good? Well, that is the worst thing about this movie to be honest. See, because the movie starts out so well, you get high hopes about the rest of the movie, and the rest is normal below average stuff same as we have been getting from Seagal in his DTV days. The plot gets lost along the way in what seems to be an interminable cast of characters that the director and the movies itself have no idea what to do with. So many people are looking for the so-called THE ITEM that you get lost in who works for whom, who is double crossing whom, who is good, who is bad, why the characters are doing this or that… To solve this, they just have Seagal kill almost every bad guy in the movie in under 10 minutes that come at the end and which are a relief because with only 3-4 characters left, yow know the movie will make sense, too bad it's over.

The good thing about this movie is that Seagal seems to want to be in this movie, seems to be having a good time, seems to be trying and I can honestly say that this time I liked the movie BECAUSE Seagal was in it NOT DESPITE that Seagal was in it.

The cast is NOT bad, not great either, but they do their job properly and don't mess up the movie, BUT the really bad dialogue that is given to them and the messy plot makes them get lost-in-translation somehow. They are cardboard characters, slightly good ones, but just not good enough.

The SFX are sometimes really bad and sometimes good (see the car chases for the bad and the car explosion at the airport for good). The costumes are OK, the locations are OK, but sometimes they work, sometimes they do not.

See, if those first 20 to 30 minutes from the beginning of the movie had been put together just a little bit better and IF the rest of the movie had been just like that, this would have been a really good movie, but it just isn't. The worst thing about this movie is that it HAD the potential, the ingredients are there on the screen, but they just form a pile of ingredients instead of one simple to digest yet nourishing meal. This is not tasty or good, it's passable, AT BEST.

Watch Shadow Man to see Seagal at his best since Into the Sun (which was his best since Exit Wounds) and for some nice hand-to-hand combat, but be warned that movie is below average and that the body double is back, only in scenes which have Seagal's character cross the street, get into a car or running. The fights are 99% done by the man himself. Be aware that very poor voice dubbing is present, but in small amounts and that the plot is messy. Seagal has fun in the movie and the girl playing the part of his daughter is a good actress.

Overall, 4/10