In short: The Glimmer Man (1996)

Sometimes, a boy just needs to remind himself of how much he hates Steven Seagal’s movies in general (and isn’t too hot on the man himself either). At least, that’s how I explain to myself why I watched this Seagal vehicle as directed by John Gray. The film falls into Seagal’s “Buddhist” phase, so his character, police lieutenant Jack Cole (who will turn out to once have been a badass black ops killer for the CIA), isn’t just a bigoted asshole bully shithead like all Seagal characters, he’s a Buddhist bigoted asshole bully shithead, and therefore also a total hypocrite, given that he’s murdering people with weaponized credit cards, his one facial expression, or shitty martial arts on the tiniest of provocations.

So it’s not really much of a surprise that he himself is quickly the favourite suspect for a serial killer he is hunting. After all, he’s apparently killing at least half a dozen people a day anyway, so him from time to time going out and murdering and then crucifying married couples seems pretty plausible. That’s my reasoning, not the film’s, mind you – the film’s is much less plausible. But don’t you worry, this is a Steven Seagal movie, so there’s never a moment where he actually seems to be about to lose a fight, his life, or his smug facial expression.

Which, as I’ve explained in the past, is pretty much the core problem with all things Seagal – he’s always treated as so clearly superior to all of his adversaries there’s no way for dramatic tension to exist in his world, no feeling of peril at all, and Seagal’s characters aren’t heroes conquering the odds but bullies beating up the physically inferior. This particular film goes so far as to even have Seagal mock the big bad during their supposedly climactic fight in a way films made by people who know what they are doing leave to the villains of an action movie.

But even if you’re a better person than I and can cope with the sheer Seagal-ness of this all, The Glimmer Man suffers from many other problems. Oh, who am I kidding, most of them still involve Seagal, because nothing in a Seagal film doesn’t. Take the way it tries to hide Seagal’s inferior screen fighting skills behind lots of vague and fast edits, so that most fights look like a Seagal-shaped form just barely visible bitch-slapping people and kicking them in the balls, which isn’t fun to watch independent of what you think about the lead. Or Seagal’s “clever” acting choice to have Cole speak in a voice somewhere between “totally stoned” and “incredibly offensive parody of a gay man” to make clear to the audience that he is an eccentric man of peace (who just happens to work in an extremely violent profession), but which mostly makes one wish somebody would punch him in the face. It’s just one atrocity after the next here, and even worse, they never seem to be committed in good fun but with a nasty sneer.


As you can see, I’m probably not the best guy to talk about Seagal movies, so hopefully, I’ll remember that and avoid them again for the next decade or so.