Inevitable synthesis reconciles the clash between the oeuvre and the definitive critical analysis of the works of a modern day master of cinema…Steven Seagal.

I’d like to briefly preface this article with criticism of an Internet institution: Ain’t It Cool News. Has any other media outlet ever conveyed such (field-specific) incredible scoops so very, very terribly? Has genuine news ever been so completely surrounded by such transparent “noise”, like favorable reviews obviously written by marketing departments? In the end, one must at least give thanks that founder Harry Knowles chose an aspect of journalism that is so very, very unimportant. If he had been instead, say, either half of Woodward and Bernstein, the world would be like Watchmen and Nixon would be serving his fifteenth term as president. To summarize: I am not so big a fan of Ain’t It Cool News.

So I approached Seagalogy: A Study Of The Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal, written by frequently featured Ain’t It Cool reviewer Vern, with a little trepidation. On the one hand, it is a critical analysis of the life and films of Steven Seagal. On the other hand, it is a critical analysis of the life and films of Steven Seagal. And if you recognized that the sentences above were not only a joke, but also reflect a certain unique quality about Seagal’s flicks, then you, like myself, have probably dedicated a little bit more attention to this douche of a bag than he probably deserves.

But it’s not our fault; Seagal is oddly intriguing. Nay, fascinating. The other big three action stars of the 80’s spat out their cheesy one-liners through slack-jawed caverns that seemed to barely have a passing acquaintance with the English language (including Stallone, who was an actual native speaker). While Seagal spoke clearly, his actual content was so baffling that it inspired disbelief.

The differences between their fighting styles were noticeable as well. Out of the Big 4 (Schwarzanegger, Stallone, Van Damme, and Seagal), Seagal was probably the deadliest in reality. But instead of solely focusing on the bone-shattering, eye-gouging, awesome portion of aikido, Seagal prefaced it with a lot of slapping, redirecting henchmen towards obstacles as they ran at him, etc. In short, his fighting style was basically half 3 Stooges short, half autopsy video. The rest of the action heroes, living in Reagan’s 80’s, observed the Second Amendment and just murdered people with guns. Expedient, efficient, oversized guns.

So, to contrast the two formulas, a typical Schwarzanegger movie would feature him blowing up a city block with a bazooka to kill one man, and then making some dumb pun. Which is kind of a hilariously disrespectful way to commemorate the taking of something as sacred as a human life. “Well, I know I just committed murder, but I really couldn’t pass up a succulent bon mot like ‘Happy Landings!’ I impaled him on the antenna of an aircraft carrier, for Christ’s sake!”

In contrast, Seagal would basically slap someone until their elbow popped out of its socket, and as they writhed in pain on the ground, he would serenely spit out a Zen koan. Which the victim would sometimes correctly counterpoint! It was basically like they were alternating reading Michael Gira lyrics, and the first time you saw it happen, it was probably the most nondiegetic bullshit you’d ever seen outside of a Leslie Nielsen film. Check out 4:30 into a clip from On Deadly Ground for a classic example of this nonsense.

And far more explosive and exciting than his fairly generic action movies was Seagal’s personal life. It was out of control. He pretended to be in the CIA, opened the first aikido dojo in Japan, bodyguarded a bunch of celebrities, got entangled with the Mafia, created an energy drink that tastes like NyQuil, got too fat and unconvincing to have his movies released in theaters and starred in a million poorly dubbed direct-to-video features, broke Sean Connery’s wrist during training, started up a blues career, became an aikido legend without ever fighting in any tournament of record, seduced anything within a ten mile radius, and wrote a script that he claimed was so beautiful that he couldn’t help but cry while he read it. It was about the CIA creating and distributing the AIDS virus. A Steven Seagal biopic stands a great chance of being the first legitimately good movie featuring his involvement in any aspect.

The book Seagalogy recognizes all this, and has been written to walk the tightrope between appreciation and humiliation; to have its cake and eat it too. It juxtaposes the politics of the Iran Contra with breakdowns of corny one-liners like “I’m gonna take you to the bank, Senator Trent…THE BLOOD BANK”. Descriptions of how Seagal circumvents traditional auteur theory perform hand-to-hand combat with ponytail jokes.

This book is a deeply researched work of criticism about the films of Steven Seagal that simultaneously observes how fucking stupid it is to create such a book. It is genius-ly dumb. Reading Seagalogy is akin to watching The Colbert Report; where you can’t help but feel excited to experience the tightrope-walk art of satire. Seagalogy puts untold amounts of effort into understanding films that were created haphazardly and designed to be as disposable as possible (particularly in the later, solely direct-to-video half of Mr. Seagal’s career).

In fact, the book’s salient characteristic is probably how much more enjoyable it is to read Vern’s analyses than to actually watch the movies being described. Take, for example, DTV release Out for a Kill, a mind-numbing excursion that currently ranks as Seagal’s 3rd least popular film on imdb.com. The movie features Seagal, rather plausibly, as a former thief of priceless Chinese jewels and artifacts who is caught, imprisoned, released, and then becomes the most distinguished professor at Yale. Although that ridiculous backstory alone would make an interesting movie, it receives short shrift; instead, the “gwilo professor” runs into an international drug smuggling ring sponsored by the Chinese Triad, shoddy wirework ensues, etc. etc. etc.

Due to its low score on IMDB and a penchant for cinemasochism [cinemasochism (n.): the desire to watch the worst movies possible as a form of entertainment], I saw this two years ago with some friends. The movie is 90 minutes long and right before the shamelessly-telegraphed climactic end battle, approximately 86 minutes into it, one friend simply got up and walked out. “Why are you leaving?” I called out, “There’s only, like, two minutes left.” “Because,” he replied, “life is too short.”

He was right. I watch a lot of terrible movies, most of which I forget pretty quickly, but Out for a Kill stood out (for a kill). So how does reading about it in Seagalogy compare?

Well, it’s awesome. Here’s a selected passage regarding the pilot who flies Seagal out to his archaeological dig:

He explains that his nickname “Crash” comes from the fact that he never has. Now, wait a minute. Is this guy telling us it is unusual for a pilot to never crash? That it is a trait so unique to him that it becomes his handle? If so, I’m never flying again. If not, shouldn’t most pilots be nicknamed Crash?

Or:

One surprisingly artful scene is the one where his house blows up with his wife inside.

The study of this terrible movie is filled with such greatness. One particularly excellent observation/digression is how the movie informs the viewer of the scene’s geographic location by rolling out computer text, accompanied by the “chooka-chooka” movie computer noise. Vern notes that no computers actually make this noise, the only reason we even associate this noise with computers is because they use the same sound in every movie, and that the only reason the noise is used is to make movies less relatable to humans, most of whom use real computers on an everyday basis. Then he points out that on the DVD release the text is not on-screen, but instead utilizes your DVD player’s subtitle function. The net result? You hear chooka-chooka but the text rolls out instantly in a generic, italicized, non-computer font. Brilliant!

This led to my current hypothesis: every Seagal film is better to read about than to actually watch. To test this, I’ve been using my Netflix account to rent his old movies. I have yet to find an instance where the analysis is not better than the film, with the possible exception of On Deadly Ground, because, let’s face it: if most of Seagal’s catalog is from Mars, that one is from Venus. But other than that, I’ll take Seagalogy over the source material every time, and encourage even non-Seagal fans to flip through a section if they see this at Barnes & Noble.

In closing, if I sound overly enthusiastic about this book, it’s probably because I am. And that’s because that is the point. Seagalogy is a celebration of trash, a monument to failure. Seagal’s movies have generated $850 million at the global box office; that’s an incredible amount of success, but most of us view Seagal as a joke (and a damn funny one at that). In the end, what Seagal does better than anyone, and what this book both matches and captures so astutely, is this: he consistently makes movies that suck so bad that they loop back around and become awesome. His successes, shortcomings, eccentricities, and cinematic je ne sais quoi have been given a tribute that matches them tonally while standing head and shoulders above them with regards to quality.