Flight of Fury
Anyone who seeks out a Steven Seagal movie has certain expectations:  Bone-crunchingly brutal martial arts action; spiritual or ecological wisdom uttered in Seagal's hoarse monotone; and one long relentless scowl.Flight of Furyfails to deliver on all counts. Seagal plays an ex-military guy who's the only man who can retrieve a stolen stealth fighter. So he goes to Afghanistan, where he teams up with a sexy agent of some kind (Ciera Payton, making her cinematic debut) to shoot a bunch of Afghan mercenaries and fly away. The only plausible explanation for this movie's existence is that Seagal and his producers bought some stock footage of jet fighters and decided to build a story around it. The action scenes are murky, brief, and edited to compensate for Seagal's increasing bulk. The rote dialogue--co-written by Seagal--is recycled from a dozen other action movies. And Seagal can't even muster the energy to frown, let alone scowl. This inert lump of a movie is the latest in a series of clumsy, incompetent, straight-to-video clunkers from Seagal, who is cynically squeezing every dollar he can out of his long-suffering fanbase.--Bret Fetzer