Mercenary for Justice (2006)

There's a moment watching Mercenary for Justice where you stop waiting for the film to get good and start genuinely wondering whether anyone involved wanted to be there. Not in a fun way. Not in that pleasantly chaotic, so-bad-it's-entertaining way. In a hollow, faintly depressing way, like watching someone phone in their own resignation letter.

This is one of the worst action films I've ever sat through, and I want to be precise about that, because "bad action film" can still mean a good time. There's joy to be found in cheap thrills, daft plotting and over-the-top violence when the people making the thing have at least a pulse. Mercenary for Justice has no pulse. It's cinema with the lights off and nobody home.

Steven Seagal, the film's leading man, delivers a performance that can only be described as horizontal. He sleepwalks through every scene with the energy of a man waiting for a delayed train, which, frankly, sounds more exciting than anything on screen here. There's a specific kind of detachment that Seagal brings, a sort of glazed, heavy-lidded absence, and in better hands (or in an earlier era of his career) that could pass for cool. Here it just looks like disinterest. You get the impression he turned up, said his lines in whatever order felt comfortable, and left before lunch.

The action sequences are, astonishingly, even worse than the performance. Fights that should crackle feel like they were choreographed by someone who'd only ever heard action described to them second-hand. Slow, clumsy, utterly tension-free. I think about something like The Raid 2, a film that reminds you what it feels like when action cinema is operating at full tilt, and the distance between that and this is almost philosophical. Or there's the kinetic storytelling of A Better Tomorrow, a film that understood momentum and feeling even when the plot was stretched thin. Mercenary for Justice doesn't understand any of that. It doesn't seem to understand that films are supposed to make you feel something.

The dialogue is something else entirely. I've seen Google Translate produce more naturalistic conversation. Characters deliver lines as though they're reading them for the first time, surprised by the words coming out of their own mouths, and frankly, so was I. As for the plot, something about mercenaries and betrayal unfolds across the runtime, though "unfolds" is far too generous a word for what actually happens. It staggers. It lurches. It occasionally falls over and lies still for several minutes before remembering it's supposed to be a film.

What gets me is that this came out in the mid-2000s but feels like a direct-to-video relic from a decade earlier. Not in a nostalgic way, not in a way that winks at you or leans into its own limitations. It just looks cheap, moves slowly and mistakes length for substance. Scenes drag on with nothing to say and nowhere to go. There's no tension, no wit, no spark of any kind. Even films that fail spectacularly tend to leave you with something to talk about. This leaves you with nothing, not even the energy to complain properly.

I genuinely questioned, somewhere around the midpoint, why I bother with films sometimes. That's not hyperbole. That's the particular kind of exhaustion this film induces. It doesn't make you angry, it doesn't make you laugh, it makes you tired. Aggressively, pointlessly tired.

One star. And that one's being generous for the sheer audacity of calling this a finished product.

Watch paint dry. Watch grass grow. Ring someone you haven't spoken to in years. Just please, for your own sake, don't watch this.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2006  | Watched: 2025-05-20

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Watch in the US
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More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More adventure: Alice in Wonderland (1951) · The Eagle (1925) · Louisiana Story (1948) · The General (1926)