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I saw that "The Foreigner" was ranked in the "Bottom 100" movie listings here on IMDb, so I wasn't expecting much when I tuned into it on the USA channel a week back, but I did have hopes. "Belly Of The Beast" (which aired a month ago) was a mess, but it had great scenery and photography and some pretty cool moments scattered throughout, so I thought that this movie might have some of the same.
Alas, this movie fails the standards of basic watch-ability in almost every way. The screenplay comes off as the bastard offspring of a John LeCarre novel and a Richard Ludlum movie, but done by people with none of those worthy writers' talent for plot and characterization. Instead what we got is a glum, mean-spirited, nihilistic, cryptic mare's nest of muddled motives, tangled alliances and back-shootings. And chest shootings. And bombings. And eviscerations. This carries over to the directorial style, which relies on hackneyed 'grainy shot/slow motion' shots every 10 seconds, along with wire work and hyperactive jump cuts. These filmic devices that were stale 10 years ago when MTV directors used them for Whitesnake videos, and the director works them like a punch press, hoping to inject some weird art-house techno thriller coolness into the proceedings.
Segal himself is just awful in this. He spends the entire film talking in a hoarse, throaty half-whisper and alternating between two expressions: looking like he is sucking on a lemon while someone waves a small turd under his nose, or looking constipated. And he's so chunky (and vain about it) that he never actually takes off his knee length duster on camera. I understand that it's hard to keep the girth under control as a male actor ages (although Denzel Washington and Paul Newman never seemed to have that problem). But you deal with it by being honest about it, and by growing as an actor, not by hiding it with carefully chosen camera angles and floor length robes.
So I can't really tell what's going on, and the movie doesn't give me a reason to care about what's going on, and the protagonist is completely one dimensional and visually unappealing. Not a recipe for a good movie experience.
Oddly, most of the set designs and scenery are atmospheric and striking; in fact, if you were to freeze the film on almost any given scene that wasn't a close-up of Seagal, you would be struck by the care and professionalism of the lighting,colors, and composition and by how beautiful the Eastern European settings are. But dressing up a rotten egg as a Faberge egg can't make it edible. And the proceedings are rotten at heart.
There are 'cool' movies (like "Versus"), and there are visually striking but emotionally cold movies (like "Underworld") and there are paranoia conspiracy thrillers (like "The Bourne Identity" and its remake with Matt Damon). And then there is this thing, which can't make up its mind what it wants to be, pretends to be all these things, and fails because it has no guts or soul.
This is a movie made by professionals with an actual budget, so you can't really put it in the same class as "Manos", "Killer Shrews" or "Hobgoblins". But I'd rather watch all three of those movies back-to-back several times than watch "The Foreigner" again even once.


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