When watching Force of Execution, you get exactly what you expect from a Steven Seagal movie, and that is a very good thing. You get a thinly veiled story that pretty much moves from one action set piece to the next while having some fantastic fight scenes and plenty of action throughout. This is the kind of movie that Seagal fans have grown to expect.
Seagal stars as a mob boss named Mr. Alexander, a former U.S. black ops soldier who decides to use what the government taught him to become a very rich and powerful man. He is also very respected and most people treat him with honor. When the movie starts though, we get one scene where Mr. Alexander proves what he will do to someone who is not honorable.
In that scene, we meet the actual hero of the movie, Roman Hurst, the right hand man and top assassin for Mr. Alexander. He is a quiet man and does his job better than just about anyone. That is, he is the best at his job until he is set up to botch a prison assassination by a prisoner named Ice Man (Ving Rhames). Thanks to Ice Man’s betrayal, Roman kills the wrong target and is “retired” by Mr. Alexander, but luckily for him, Mr. Alexander likes him and sends out the order that Roman is to not die.
However, Roman has both hands broken and mangled and his career is over with.
Roman is portrayed by a relative newcomer, world champion martial arts star Bren Foster. Before this movie, he appeared in Maximum Conviction, a Seagal movie with Stone Cold Steve Austin, and a few smaller efforts. Women out there may know him from a stint in 2011-12 on the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives. He is fantastic in his role here, a legitimate bad ass who has some of the best kicks I have seen in a movie outside of Jean Claude Van Damme. Honestly, his fighting style is a nice compliment to Steven Seagal’s Aikido.
Roman is swept back into the thick of things when Ice Man gets out of prison and decides that the gangs need to take the streets back, and away from Mr. Alexander, and he starts a large gang war between the two sides. Luckily, Roman’s hand problems are fixed when he meets a self professed voodoo doctor played by Danny Trejo.
Yeah, that is what kind of movie Force of Execution is.
As I said, the story is just kind of there and things happen to pretty much move the story from one set piece to the next. The acting is surprisingly good, especially considering the fact that we are talking about a B-grade action movie. There might be a little too much voice over internalization by Seagal, but it doesn’t get in the way of the action – which is why we came to see this movie in the first place.
At the end of the day, Force of Execution is a movie that has Steven Seagal beating up three gangsters to save “his girl,” huge gun fights in a mansion where everyone dies but the four people we care most about facing off in the end, and some fantastic fight scenes with Bren Foster kicking people’s heads off. There is also gratuitous nudity because a number of scenes take place in a strip club. You can’t ask for much more from a B-grade action movie.
Special Features
There is only one special feature on the Force of Execution Blu-ray/DVD combo pack – a 17-minute “making of” feature. Most of the feature is the director, actors Steven Seagal and Ving Rhames, and various other cast and crew members talking about how great everyone is. However, there are a number of fun things in this feature, including a look at the fight scenes and how Seagal works to make sure that anything that happens in the movie’s fights would work in real life. It isn’t much, and there is one too many musical montages of clips from the movie, but it is better than nothing.
