Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Dwight H. Little
Year: 1990
Rating: 
WORTH A LOOK
It’s hard to believe that Marked For Death came out in 1990. It seems like such a slab of 80s cheese.
In Marked For Death, when Mexican drug runners want to meet with our heroes, naturally they pick a combination strip bar/bordello as the location for the deal. Hey, I’m always up for gratuitous nudity.
Steven Seagal does his usual duckwalk throughout, wearing an array of ridiculous costumes. The action sequences are okay, I suppose. They certainly benefit from a lack of CGI, though I wish the filmmakers had gone for the gusto a little more. I mean, if you already have an R rating, why not make the violence a little more graphic? Still, I appreciated the broken bones you can usually count on in a Seagal flick. Backs, necks, forearms, legs, and hands all go K-A-R-R-A-C-K! in a satisfying way. Eye gouging, impaling, and beheading are also on the menu. Yum!
If you’re into watching old movies for comedic value, you’ll probably get a laugh out some of the lame-brained plotting from screenwriters Michael Grais and Mark Victor. At one point, the villains have one of Seagal’s relatives in their clutches. Seagal speeds along in his penis-shaped muscle car to save the girl. Seagal arrives in the nick of time and… 1) …engages the enemy in a furious battle or… 2) …the enemy runs away like little girls even though they outnumber Seagal 10 to 1 and are heavily armed. Yep, number 2 wins.
Here’s another one. The villains have Seagal trapped in a crushed car. They set the car on fire. Do they… 1) …shoot Seagal in the legs so he can’t escape 2) …watch to make Seagal doesn’t get out of the car before it explodes or 3) …flee the scene? Yep, you geussed it — number 3.
Both our heroes and the villains are such idiots it starts to become comical. I dunno. I’m not really that big a fan of camp. I prefer actual thrills.
It’s too bad, because the mileau is actually kind of interesting. The villains are members of a Jamaican drug gang. They practice voodoo and their leader is one crazy bastard by the name of Screwface (Basil Wallace). In a fearless performance, Wallace takes the risk of seeming ridiculous, playing Screwface as a preening psycho who enjoys invading other people’s personal space. Wallace manages to be entertaining, scary, and convincing, all at the same time.
If the screenplay had been more logical, the action more hard-hitting and less routine, and the violence more horrific, Marked For Death might have been a classic. As it is, it’s only intermittently amusing.
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