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| From http://seagalology.com/img/movies/bellyofthebeast.jpg |
Dir. Siu-Tung Ching
Canada-Hong Kong-United Kingdom
A film like this matches the
erratic nature of the blog, if anyone does go on to watch it, or already have
prior to reading this review, in that it proves that the least expected
sources, the bad as well as good, can possess some unique marks to them if scrutinised.
The story of Belly of the Beast is
not that surprising, an ex-CIA agent (Steven
Seagel) going to Thailand when his daughter is kidnapped and staging a
one-man army against the perpetrators. Very much like many of Seagal’s straight-to-video work, if not
some of the earlier cinema releases as well, an incident sets off Seagal going to an unknown country or environment
and getting justice, tackling criminals, corrupt cops, terrorists and many
other archetypes of evil in action cinema, a genre which is both plagued and gifted
with the fact that repetition within its films can happen continually, either
allowing a beautiful synchronicity between multiple films from different
sources or a really dull ninety minutes or so for many of them. The fact that made this look like it would be
the former instead was the director being Siu-Tung
Ching, who made A Chinese Ghost
Story (1987), and as I will elaborate on later has a tonally shifting
nature to all the films of his I’ve seen that is uniquely his.
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| From http://www.imfdb.org/images/thumb/3/39/Belly_of_the_Beast-Carbine-1.jpg/600px-Belly_of_the_Beast-Carbine-1.jpg |
For the first half of the film, Belly of the Beast is pretty generic
and tedious. Seagal is an unfortunate
case of someone who, even if I want to avoid laughing at him, has ended up
swallowing his own hype without realising that his professional work have lost
the punch that would have backed up his ego and made him king of
straight-to-video action section of cinema, maybe even giving him roles in
films that go theatrically again beyond a small performance in Machete (2010). Many of them
effectively end up as the continuations of Seagal’s
sole directorial effect On Deadly Ground
(1994), centring himself in the core of the film, instead of merely being
the protagonist, without the visceral or charismatic factor that would be
needed, and he possessed, to make it work; the problem with the straight-to-DVD
films is that at least Seagal was
trying to make a sincere message film in On
Deadly Ground, putting his heart into it, even if it was horribly sanctimonious.
Belly of the Beast – such a cruel
choice of title considering the jokes made at the expense of Seagal’s age over the years – suffers from
what most Western martial art films enforce to their own detriment despite a
Chinese director who also does the fight choreography. Having to contend with Seagal’s decreased agility, the film has
to push forward even more the terrible tendency of filtering fight scenes
through techniques such as slow motion and rapid editing. Hong Kong cinema in
its heyday used techniques like this heavily too, but it was to amplify the
fighting as it was depicted, usually shown with the camera back, in full takes,
to show the movements instead of close-up and cut into multiple images. The breaking
up of scenes, not just those involving combat, in Belly of the Beast, not taking into account the flashbacks to
scenes from earlier in the film to remind you of what happened, smooths the movie
to the point it exhibits little to stand out and be visible. It leaves you with
the plodding clichés of the script which cannot sustain itself.
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| From http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l519/holymannn/2part/01/Belly-of-the-Beast-caps-3.png |
The second half, even if the film
is still bad, shows what could have been though. While the strands are
introduced in the beginning and were probably contributed by the scriptwriter,
the director in the few films of his I have seen, even when he is co-directing
with Johnnie To, has a tendency to
create movies which have drastically changing tangents that are unexplained or
jolt from what was before. A Chinese
Ghost Story is full of them be manages to wrangle them into a consistent
whole that is very successful. Belly of
the Beast however feels as if Siu-Tung
was bored with the first half and leapt on the supernatural and lurid aspects
that came crashing in the plot as it progresses. He tries his best to make Seagal a full blown onscreen juggernaut,
with extensive use of wire-fu techniques and body doubles, but attempting to
make him a full blown character from a Hong Kong film fails because of his
physical limits and the straightjacket that the more Western directorial style
creates around itself. Then, with Buddhism and black magic involved on the good and bad sides as if
I’ve ended up in the same world as The
Boxer’s Omen (1983) again, and the vague potential of a kinky sexual edge
that dies when it goes back to its 15 certificate action scenes, it shifts to
the more ridiculous. It’s befuddling, as it mismatches the nu-metal scored tone
of the rest of the film, the comfortable yet redundant world of Seagal’s straight-to-video work briefly
assaulted by the skirmish of something that would have been fare better if it
was allowed full control over the material. Sadly another problem with some of
the Seagal films is that rewatches
diminish their quality; I liked On
Deadly Ground until I rewatched it, and after three viewings within these
two years of Belly of the Beast, it’s
gotten worse, its erratic nature devoured by the lameness of the tone of the
whole film set in the first half. It doesn’t have the ridiculous eighties/early
nineties tone of Hard To Kill (1990),
which did survive a rewatch, or the grime of Out For Justice (1991) which may get a lot better on a second
viewing. I still want to watch more of Seagal’s
work but even his theatrically released work losses it charm on multiple
viewings, Seagal not really the kind
of action hero who really provokes any passion to him except those rare cases
where everything works. Belly of the
Beast was prolonged for me to write about and make available online in some
way or so because it was an example where the comfortably lazy type of Seagal
film was rebelled against, briefly twisted the conventions he always brings
with him in these films. It sadly didn’t succeed, but the markings in the film
were fascinating to ponder about even if Belly
of the Beast will never been actively viewed again.
It also enforces the fact that I
prefer Jean-Claude Van Damme,
although that is a topic for another day to look into.
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| From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp_RuWQmksO__0nYQ3fG7PLU6ehRYRI4Z-dgIUeLHlROcJ3XFEvjD0hRq9159KxUd7EohnyGqJ6E-5UDRTIKx0pVcDDbt6WALeQmUHOmXVmWKyC3FheJ7Z9X2cocUzjpLKUfHfxOIFlo6w/s1600/Belly-of-the-Beast-2003-4.jpg |
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