Movie 32: Kill Switch

Hello February. From now on it gets steadily more difficult to work out if I’m all caught up or not!

I actually got some of the points for the synopsis from reading other ones online and not the movie itself. I’ll address those points after.

Steven Seagal play a detective who is troubled by the fact that he watched the murder of his twin brother when they were children. He’s on the trail of two serial killers, one he catches right at the start and the other he’s hunting for throughout the movie. And the first one gets out on appeal mainly because he was too heavy handed in the arrest so he has to catch him again.

It’s a dumb action movie, so plot schmot. Actually its trying to be a smart detective story but it doesn’t get past sm. Inexplicably Seagal has a…well I think its New Orleans accent. This is inexplicable for two reasons. 1) The film is set in Memphis and 2) he appears to be from the precinct that he’s working in. Going by the last few minutes, where I was essentially asking the screen what the fuck was going on, he travels back to his family in somewhere that people speak French. And everyone gets presents. I’m not sure if its meant to be Christmas or not. I thought he had a relationship with one of the cops who he appeared to live with, but either he doesn’t or they’re just friends or she’s a bit on the side. It’s not really clear.

As for the twin brother murder flash backs. I didn’t realise it was his twin brother. They seem to be at a birthday party and the cake seemed to only have “Happy Birthday Daniel” on it. It might have had two names, I have no idea. And the kids might have looked the same, in fact that would explain some of the confusion I had as two who was going to be murdered. I don’t remember him ever actually addressing the whole thing in the present day.

I know I said a few reviews ago that I like Seagal movies. Not all of them though. This is utter DREK. The dialogue is damned awful and half the time I couldn’t understand his “obligatory pithy one liners”. And the god damned editing is atrocious. Every single fight scene is like MTV on steroids, and has repeat shots like old kung fu movies. And in two separate action scenes they intersplice shots of Seagal looking stoic. But it’s the same damned shot over and over. Very noticeably the same shot. That’s just lazy.

Sure this cost about $5 to make and sure its just a dumb DTDVD movie, but it could have been way better if a writer had taken a shot at the script, someone had directed it and they had a decent supporting cast. But none of those things happened so I just wasted 90 minutes and lost a tiny piece of my soul.

Next up: Let The Right One In