Straight-to-video style action thrillers have a very low bar to clear for success. To function, the plot needs to be as simply drawn as the action is intricately choreographed. Deep, resonant characterization is unnecessary, but some well photographed explosions and perhaps the occasional tawdry sex scene are practically guaranteed. Code of Honor, the latest Steven Seagal vehicle, trips over that low bar, tumbling down a steep staircase and hitting every cliché on the way down.
Seagal stars as Robert Sikes, an ex-Special Forces operative who, for no discernible reason, is using his military prowess to hunt down and kill criminals indiscriminately. It’s basically a shitty version of The Punisher, but even the worst adaptations of that particular Marvel property (looking at you, Thomas Jane) manage to make their principal vigilante understandable, if not quite relatable. Here, however, Sikes just randomly kills lawbreakers with no explanation. It’s nearly an hour into the film before his typically stock motivation is illuminated, and by that time you’ve either made up a more interesting rationale yourself or accepted that this movie isn’t concerned with thematic coherence.
Each individual massacre, as depicted, feels less like real screen action than parodied cut scene fodder. The criminal element is stereotype plus, as the film’s opening drug deal has slick haired, besuited sleazoids and flannel wearing Hispanics trading slang-filled barbs before being riddled with gunfire. The “villains” Sikes slaughters aren’t even partially realized people. They all come off like a Breitbart commentator’s rough sketch of recidivism, a repetitive series of snarling, ethnic boogeymen awaiting the justified impact of a bullet.
The film’s questionable morality might not be as glaring if the set pieces weren’t so bland and plodding. Sikes is supposed to come off as an avenging reaper, but the reality of Seagal’s dwindling screen presence prevents these sequences from projecting any sense of menace. What should read as methodical comes off as lumbering. His scowl, meant to mimic Charles Bronson hardness, is a perpetual half smirk. There’s zero sense of urgency to his carnage, so the combatants he fells seem even more impotent than the usual straw men Seagal tends to murder for kicks on film.
Few action heroes age gracefully, but Seagal is seriously falling apart here. He’s become the IRL version of his South Park parody counterpart, 45% paunch and 55% self-satisfied machismo. He’s entirely too much human meat tightly coiled into the wrap of an afghan scarf, unable to move his neck, much less his other extremities. This movie drones on for 45 minutes before he speaks his first line of dialogue, and once he does, he sounds like a marble mouthed Chef Paul Prudhomme. Paired with Seagal closely resembling a race bent Tom Hanks in Cloud Atlas, this strange delivery would be a brilliant artistic choice, if it actually was a choice and not the sad reality of his inability to converse coherently.
Mercifully, he splits the screen time with Night Breed’s Craig Sheffer, who plays William Porter, a fake FBI agent hunting Sikes, in between recreationally disemboweling interlopers with giant knives. Sheffer isn’t a great actor by any means, but he seems to be the only person having any kind of fun on this project. By the time it’s revealed that these two men used to be in the same unit, they’re already pushing that “opposite sides of the same coin” shtick hard. There are no less than four scenes that purposefully echo the diner scene in Heat but in different locations. Both men take turns talking like their dialogue was written with the semen sopped tip of a spent dick. It’s an all-out Lensman Arms Race of masculine horse shit.
Just as the film begins to hit a stride, for absolutely no good reason, the movie tries to throw you a curveball twist that is as insulting as it is irritating. The conclusion tries to end like Shane, but there’s a level of myth no one involved with this production is capable of conjuring. Like Seagal’s burnt, Florida orange flesh, Code of Honor is an overcooked mess. It’s just an endless ramble of low impact hand to hand combat, CGI blood spurts and poorly framed explosions, all awash in harsh Skinemax lighting. What’s the opposite of “high octane?” This is that. There are pornos out there with a clearer adherence to internal logic, better acting and more satisfying money shots.
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