March 17, 2001 | In preparation for his latest comeback vehicle, the aptly titled Exit Wounds, action star Steven Seagal clipped his ponytail, shed several excess pounds and, apparently, worked very, very hard at learning to better enunciate his dialogue. He continues to saunter through scenes with all the insouciant swagger of a man with a hammer who views each of his fellows as a potential nail. His saving grace, however, is that he has begun to develop a healthy sense of humor about himself.
Seagal seems especially bemused – he stops just short of actually winking at the audience – when Orin Bond, the Detroit police detective he portrays in Exit Wounds, is ordered to attend an anger management class. Not surprisingly, Orin is not a model student. And he’s more than a little embarrassed when he can barely extract his beefy frame from the constraints of a small desk. But Orin quickly cheers up when, after leaving the classroom, he finds some foolhardy car thieves to pummel.
Other funny bits in Exit Wounds involve Seagal’s interactions with Tom Arnold, frightfully well cast as a crass TV talk-show host, and Anthony Anderson, playing a wisecracking, roly-poly nightclub owner. The latter two are teamed during the closing credits as talk-show co-hosts, and their boisterously crude give-and-take suggests a spin-off sequel might be warranted.
Unfortunately, the fleeting moments of comic relief are surrounded by long stretches of generic cop-movie action in Exit Wounds. This is the kind of by-the-numbers enterprise where, every few minutes, a man shoots a gun or a woman bares her breasts. For the sake of variety, a couple of men bare their breasts in a police station locker room. But no woman, not even the precinct commander played by Jill Hennessy (TV’s Law and Order), ever gets to lock and load. Obviously, the filmmakers figured there was a limit to how much innovation Steven Seagal’s fans would accept.
Orin, a rule-busting maverick who somehow manages to enrage his superiors while saving the life of the U.S. Vice President, is transferred to the worst precinct in all of Detroit. (The mean streets don’t look very scary, perhaps because most of the movie was shot in Toronto.) With a little help from his idealistic new partner (Isaiah Washington), our hero uncovers a dastardly scheme by crooked cops to sell heroin seized during drug busts. Hip-hop star DMX plays Latrell Walker, a shady character who figures prominently in the dirty doings. To be more specific about his role, however, would entail spoiling one of the script’s few surprises.
Exit Wounds might be mildly diverting if you watched it on cable in a bar during happy hour. Certainly, the movie would lose little on a smaller screen. Except for two or three action set pieces, director Andrzej Bartkowiak uses very few of the visual pyrotechnics he displayed in the far more entertaining Romeo Must Die. Maybe he didn’t think they would help.
