Above the Law (1988)

(In French, On TV, January 2020) Notable for being Steven Seagal’s movie debut, Above the Law is a bit of an odd duck in retrospect—Seagal is still his usual I-can’t-believe-he-was-an-action-star slimy self, but at least he’s younger and not yet calcified in his increasingly tedious screen persona. At times, we get sequences that would be very much out of character later on. It’s clearly a Seagal film that doesn’t know that it’s a Seagal film yet, so the formula’s not quite there. Alas, this means that the film is a somewhat bland 1980s action movie instead: the film built around Seagal’s star-making manoeuvre (let us be reminded that Seagal was, at the time, a protégé of super-powerful agent Michael Ovitz) is a generic vehicle representative of the era—slick and polished, like the middle-grade Hollywood movies of the time, with a plot that blends a cop protagonist with an overstuffed plot made of drugs, weapons dealing, CIA shenanigans, Catholic imagery and even a Vietnam flashback to round things up. At least things are better when it comes to supporting actresses, with an early turn for Sharon Stone and Pam Grier with such a presence that even the film itself seems awed by her. There are, eventually, a few decent-for-the-time action sequences once the narrative throat clearing is over, and even Seagal skeptics may find themselves intrigued by his turn here—before his ego took over and led to the career he had. Still, this isn’t much of a film—and so we come to the curious conclusion that if it wasn’t for Seagal, Above the Law would be better but utterly unmemorable.