Hard to Kill (1990) - Retrospective Review

Director: Bruce Malmuth

Cast: Steven Seagal, Kelly LeBrock, William Sadler, Frederick Coffin

Country: United States

Rating: R

Run Time: 96 minutes

Hard to Kill is one of Seagal's "three word title" films from his Golden Age (according to Vern's Seagology book). The great thing about the "three word title" Seagal films is that you can place "Steven Seagal is..." before any of them and form an awesome sentence. Steven Seagal is...Above the Law,  Steven Seagal is...Out for Justice, etc. They also feature Seagal at his leanest, freshest, and most brutal. If you are an action fan, Seagal's "three word title" films are a must see!

Hard to Kill is a small scale action film that kicks ass and takes names. It features arguably Seagal's finest performance as Mason Storm, a cop who comes back from a coma in order to enact vengeance on the corrupt cops and politicans who took his family from him. While I relatively enjoy every classic Seagal film, I found myself madly in love with this one. In contrast to Above the Law and Out for Justice, Hard to Kill takes its sweet time in getting to the violence. The film focuses on drama and character in order to deliver a satisfying final act of action and bloodshed. Unless Seagal films unseen by me like Marked for Death or On Deadly Ground come to blow my mind, Hard to Kill might just be Seagal's best film.

The M1911, a man's best friend.

Hard to Kill opens up with a prologue set in Los Angeles, California, 1982, on Oscar night. I mention this because the opening 20 minutes of the film are going to drive it into your brain! You will never hear more mentions of the Academy Awards in such a short time span in cinema history. Anyways, Mason Storm (Steven Seagal, as if I had to let you know) is a detective who investigates a mob meeting late at night. The meeting concerns Senator Trent (William Sadler) and his desire to higher the mob to wipe out his political competition. After recording some sweet dirt, Storm high tails it out of there. He makes a quick pit stop at a liquor store first though and beats the hell out of some muggers. But anyways, Storm notifies his superior of the crucial information he has uncovered. However, corrupt cops working for the mob listen in on this information and put a hit on Storm. When Storm arrives home, hit men gun down him and his wife. 

The reason I immediately place Hard to Kill at the top of the Seagal pack is because the film "kills" him in the first 20 minutes! They don't get better than that! However, we all know he's not really dead. Storm survives the attack but ends up in a coma. Thanks to the help of his friend O'Malley (Frederick Coffin), Storm is labeled as a John Doe in order to keep him safe. Storm eventually wakes up from his coma Kill Bill style in a hospital several years later in 1990, the present. With the help of a nurse named Andy (Kelly LeBrock, Seagal's wife at the time), Storm escapes the hospital and sets out to heal himself in preparation for his revenge against the men who took his family from him. Damn, talk about a satisfying set up for an action film. Hard to Kill is 90's action at its most simplistic, grounded, and satisfying. They just don't make them like they used too.

90's hottie Kelly LeBrock.

One of Hard to Kill's strongest elements is its steady pacing. Instead of rushing to Storm's revenge, the film takes its time leading up to all of the action and gun play. We get to watch Storm wake up from his coma, barely escape the hospital with his life, apply acupuncture and herbs to his wounds, meditate, and even re-train himself in martial arts and gun firing. This portion of the film where Storm trains himself and investigates into the whereabouts of his former son takes up a whopping 50 minutes of the film after the opening prologue. This means that the film doesn't get to its first major action scene until around an hour into the film. While there are some cool beat downs in the first 15 minutes, that is all you get for a helluva long time. However, the drama and build up is so good that you know that the action scenes are going to be well earned once you arrive to them. This is one of the reasons Hard to Kill excels as an action film and joins the list of great small scale action pictures of the 90's.

And you know what else makes a great action film? Training montages! We need more awesome training montages scored by electric guitars in our action films! It is eery how similar the basic set up and training montages of Hard to Kill is in comparison to Ringo Lam's 1993 heroic bloodshed film, Full Contact. Both films' protagonists survive a nearly unsurvivable incident and than go into hiding in order to train and heal themselves. This means that the protagonists train their hearts out by doing pull ups, running laps, and testing their gun skills to awesome 90's electric guitar riffs. And while I think that Chow Yun Fat got a more bad ass training montage in Full Contact, Seagal's training montages are one of the most memorable aspects of his film.

As I stated before, the action scenes in Hard to Kill are great. The film favors gun fights and shootouts over Seagal's typical limb breaking and face smashing. However, there are still a few great beats of physical contact to please any martial arts fan. Two scenes in particular stood out to me as premiere action set pieces. The first is when Storm and his wife are attacked while in their bedroom. As soon as the gun men break through their door, Storm rolls off the bed, grabs his hand gun, and fires away into one of the hit men. Unfortunately, the men fire into Storm and that is when he really gets pissed off. Storm rushes one of the gun men and than proceeds to beat the hell out of him and snap his hand backwards. However, the gun men finish off Storm's attacks by blasting him one more time and finishing off his wife as well. It's an incredibly short but tense and powerful action scene that features Seagal at his most vulnerable as he screams at the top of his lungs and gets shot into numerous times.

Breaking Bad's Dean Norris even pops up as a trigger happy henchie.

The other standout action set piece of the film is the home invasion that takes place after 50 minutes of no action. As Storm and Andy pack their bags to leave their mansion, gun men break into the house and proceed to shoot at them. Unfortunately for those men, their target is Seagal and that means that he is going to dodge every bullet and destroy every single one of them. It's a great action scene filled with gun shots, limb snapping, grenade tossing, and even an automobile escape. I can tell you that after 50 minutes of nothing but drama, I was flipping out during this explosion of small scaled action and hand to hand combat.

Let it be known that Steven Seagal can kick butt in an action scene and emote too! Storm is placed into an incredibly emotional and personal predicament that forces him to confront the loss of his wife and the possibility of losing his son. Seagal also nails several pure Seagal scenes where he works in personal aspects of his life into the film. The most obvious scene of this nature is when Andy asks Storm how he learned how to write Chinese. Storm proceeds to tell her a story about where he was raised and about a man who taught him martial arts. It is fairly similar but different from the clearly autobiographical introduction of Above the Law where the film uses real stories and pictures of Seagal in order to explain his character's background. 

Seagal also carries an immense kindness to his character in such scenes where he prays with his son before bed time and thanks Andy for her detective work. I wish every Seagal role was as good as this one because I love the guy in this film! I also can't go without mentioning the champion one-liners that come out of Seagal's mouth. My favorite zingers include, "Oh we'll get them buddy. Every last f****** one," "I'm going to take you to the bank Senator Trent...the blood bank," and "That's for killing my wife! F*** you and die!" As one of Storm's fellow officers tells him, "You won the Oscar, Storm!"

Co-star Kelly LeBrock is definitely 90's cute but nothing to write home about. She brings all of the cheese to the film with numerous corn ball lines. After the big home invasion, there is a painful ADR line of her saying, "Oops, I didn't lock the front door." There is also a corny as heck scene where Andy walks into Storm's room clearly desiring sex but holds up a flower and says, "I was walking by and thought you'd like a flower." Unlike Seagal, LeBrock does not win the Oscar on this one.

Seagal aims and fires.

Even though main villain Senator Trent is barely in the film, it is worth mentioning that he is played by William Sadler (Iron Man 3). 1990 was a pretty good year for Sadler as far as action villains came. He did both Hard to Kill and Die Hard 2: Die Harder in the same year. That's pretty good if you ask me. Another casting worth mentioning is that Dean Norris of Breaking Bad fame pops up as one of the film's corrupt cops that Seagal takes on. I bring this up because Seagal took on Jonathan Banks, another Breaking Bad cast member, in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. If I discover that Seagal takes on another Breaking Bad cast member in one of his films, than I am definitely on to something.

Besides Breaking Bad, Kill Bill, and Full Contact, I noticed an even more bizarre movie connection with this film. During the finale, one of Trent's corrupt cops runs around a mansion looking for Storm. However, he continually runs into phrases written around the house by Storm. The one worth mentioning is "You're Next" written on a wall. Now I don't know if it is a coincidence or not, but I bet that Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett of You're Next and The Guest fame had to have seen this film in order to be somewhat inspired for the writings on the walls in their film You'e Next. If there is another horror film out there that specifically does this, let me know people. Otherwise, this has got to be the source.

Hard to Kill's final piece of the bad ass action movie puzzle is its perfect score by David Michael Frank. Frank balances emotional music, energetic guitar riffs, and moody synthesized beats a-la John Carpenter all in one score. It is one of the film's strongest elements and it literally carries the film from scene to scene. I cannot praise Frank's eighties and nineties-esque score enough. I love it with all of my heart.

Oh come on, Seagal wouldn't pull the trigger. Right?

Hard to Kill is the Seagal film that I have been needing to see all along. While I originally thought that Above the Law was the man's finest hour, this is clearly Seagal at the top of his game. Even though Above the Law has more action scenes, Hard to Kill has a better lead performance, drama, and rocking soundtrack. Seagal is lean, charming, awesome, and likable all under an hour and forty minutes. I had a blast watching this film and highly recommend it to all action fans. 

Rating: 9/10 - Seagal's second action film is bad ass, entertaining, and even a little dramatic. One of the finest small scaled action films of the 1990's.