Exit Wounds

by CHRISTOPHER TOOKEY, Daily Mail

Exit Wounds begins with a heroic cop (Steven Seagal) saving the life of a namby-pamby U.S. Vice-President (we actually see this wimp arguing that illegal firearms shouldn't fall into the hands of children).

Seagal's an impulsive kind of guy, and he can't stand to see even an anti-violent V-P's motorcade fall foul of an assassination attempt, so he pulls out his trusty six-shooter and engineers single-handedly the deaths of about a dozen bad guys, most of them armed with automatic weapons - plus he gets to explode the bad guys' helicopter.

You really won't believe what happens next. Our hero is not congratulated by a grateful nation, not even by a mildly relieved Vice-President.

Instead, he's treated as a pariah and demoted. The dopey liberals who notoriously run the American penal system even insist on him going to rage control classes.

Is there a public outcry? Nope. Does our hero rebel against his loony treatment or use it as proof of constructive dismissal? Nope. He rises above his foes with Zen insouciance, like Jonathan Livingston Seagal.

It turns out that the attack on the V-P is merely a wham-bam prologue, the thinnest of pretexts to get our principled hero sent to Detroit's toughest precinct, full of the most flamboyantly corrupt cops since the days of Serpico.

His new boss is an impossibly glamorous, beautifully made-up feminist (Jill Hennessy), whose role is to give our hero a hard time for being macho.

For this, of course, she gets killed. This wouldn't be a Joel Silver-produced movie if all the women weren't ball-breaking bitches, topless pole-dancers or horribly slaughtered.

Anyone who experienced Seagal's films when he was in his prime will know that he is to acting ability what Robin Cook is to personal magnetism, but in addition to his other deficiencies he now has the athleticism and well-nurtured waistline of Jabba the Hutt.

This makes the action sequences more than usually hilarious.

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