Heavy Action: OUT FOR JUSTICE

 by Patrick Bromley

Still my favorite Steven Seagal movie.

It's hard to talk about Steven Seagal the Person these days given the current state of global affairs, what with him being Putin-loving human trash faced with multiple accusations of sexual harassment. I'm not going to touch any of that in talking about Steven Seagal the Movie Star -- particularly in the early '90s, with both Seagal and the kinds of movies in which he specialized were in their prime. It's within this landscape that the actor and martial artist dropped Out for Justice into our laps in 1991, right between Marked for Death in '90 and Under Siege in '92. It was the best possible time for Steven Seagal fans.

Seagal plays the hilariously-named Gino Felino, a real FUHGEDDABOUTIT Brooklyn Italian working as a detective for the NYPD. Gino's partner Bobby (Gino Acovone) is gunned down in front of his family by Richie Madano (William Forsythe), a former childhood friend turned criminal on a crazy rampage of drugs and murder. Determined to bring Richie down, Gino is given free reign by his shockingly hands-off captain (Jerry Orbach) to go rogue and stop the killer crackhead by any means necessary. Gino is out for payback. Out for revenge. OUT FOR JUSTICE.

Say what you want about Steven Seagal -- and there is so, so much that can be said -- but the guy had an incredible run at the start of his big screen career. In the four-year span between 1988 and 1992, Seagal made five movies, all of them total bangers. He cultivated an onscreen persona almost immediately with his lightning fast moves, his whisper-quiet delivery, and a mysterious backstory for both his characters and for himself. He was a hard guy to pin down at the start. What makes Out for Justice stand out in his early filmography is that Seagal's performance carries none of the baggage of his personal biography or mythology. It's just that: an actual performance. I'm not saying it's a good performance, exactly, but he does manage to create an actual character in Gino Felino. He does his Brooklyn accent (the first of many accents he would eventually adopt over the course of his career, most of them some kind of Russian-adjacent nonsense), he gets to speak Italian, he has marital troubles, he shows his softer side by rescuing and adopting an adorable puppy. Out for Justice also features my favorite moment of Seagal ever captured on screen, when a sex worker propositions him and asks "Do you wanna fuck?" and his response is just to let out a high pitched but very sincere laugh. It's the lightest and most human he ever allows himself to be in any movie and the closest he ever gets to the likes of John McClane. 

A big reason for his early success is that Seagal was working with talented directors -- journeyman filmmakers like Andrew Davis and Dwight H. Little who knew how to put a movie together and always found interesting ways to elevate what might otherwise be a totally standard actioner. In the case of Out for Justice, Seagal worked with John Flynn, the director responsible for Rolling Thunder, The Outfit, Defiance, and Best Seller. He's a guy who knows how movies work is what I'm saying, and he brings to the Seagal vehicle a no-nonsense understanding of revenge movie dynamics: find the guy that did you wrong and make him pay. The screenplay by R. Lance Hill (credited here on his last feature as David Lee Henry) is repetitive, yes, and often amounts to Seagal showing up places and yelling out "Anyone here seen Richie?" before getting into a fight. Flynn and his editors -- more on that in a minute -- have whittled the story down to its barest essentials and streamline the action into something raw and propulsive. The director also works overtime to give Out for Justice a real sense of place; even though much of the movie was actually shot in Los Angeles, there's a real New York feel to the locations and the photography that serve the material well. This is the most street-level gritty of all Seagal's films.

Another reason Out for Justice stands out is the villain turn by William Forsythe as crackhead Richie, a guy made totally terrifying because he has nothing left to lose. Like an early iteration of Heath Ledger's Joker, Richie has no plan, no agenda beyond being an agent of chaos and death. He knows his days are numbered thanks to either drugs or the target on his back so he's determined to go out in a blaze of fucked up glory -- less a criminal mastermind than a meth-addled bull in a city-wide china shop. This character, a real original kind of villain in 1991, is brought to sweaty, insane life by an insane, sweaty William Forsythe, who could also be seen on screen playing a sweaty, insane biker the same year in the sublime actioner Stone Cold. Forsythe is so over the top and compelling, in fact, that Seagal reportedly requested his scenes be cut back so as not to be upstaged by the villain. Warner Bros., who already wanted the film cut down for length and pacing, was all to happy to comply and edited the film down from being a mafia epic to a more traditional Seagal actioner. While I certainly wonder what Could Have Been when it comes to Flynn's original vision, I'm a fan of the finished film and don't lament what was lost.

While I tend to love viewing and writing about Heavy Action titles as extensions of their stars -- the action hero as auteur -- what I like about Out for Justice is how much it diverges from Steven Seagal's usual onscreen persona. Almost every single one of his other movies already fits that formula, telling us something about the star with their characterizations of him a mysterious and mystical pony-tail'd badass (for more on this phenomenon, I point you in the direction of previous guest Outlaw Vern's amazing book on Seagal's filmography Seagology). This one and a small handful of others -- among them Pistol Whipped, arguably the best of his large DTV library -- afford Seagal the opportunity to give a performance instead of simply posturing. Don't get me wrong: he still does a lot of posturing in the movie both on and off camera (he was reportedly so full of himself on set that stunt coordinator Gene LeBell choked him out on a dare and Seagal shit his pants), but at least in Out for Justice he's posturing as someone other than "Steven Seagal Stand-In." It makes a difference.

So, yes, Out for Justice remains my favorite of Steven Seagal's films. It's got the best villain (even beating out titans like Screwface in Marked for Death and Strannix in Under Siege). It's got a gritty street vibe. It's got a Gina Gershon to burn. It's got brutal violence and the kickass pool hall fight. It's one of the great action movies from the Best Year for Action Movies Ever, and demonstrates (as do all his early films) that Seagal should have continued teaming with talented filmmakers and maybe his legacy would be a little different today, professionally speaking at least. Instead, he peaked with Under Siege and then hired himself to direct On Deadly Ground, marking the beginning of the end for him as a real-deal theatrical star. It didn't help matters that the kind of action movie for which guys like Seagal and JCVD had become known was starting to go out of fashion by the mid-'90s, just a few years after Out for Justice hit theaters. The budgets would get bigger, the stars would get bigger, the set pieces would get bigger. There was no more room for scrappy little no-nonsense actioners like this one. We didn't know how good we had it.