Exit Wounds

To watch a Steven Seagal film, one must fully suspend all disbelief. And to fully enjoy the audacity of Seagal, one must ignore all of the consequences associated with fistfights in flashy nightclubs, gun battles, car crashes and being able to cash out stock options from a dot-com and then create a private surveillance unit devoted to uncovering a ring of corrupt Detroit cops involved in smuggling heroin inside of sweatshop-produced T-shirts. \nI remember a time when I used to enjoy Seagal. Such films as "Above the Law," "Hard to Kill" and "Out for Justice" are all solid action films from the '90s. But lately, films like "Under Siege 2" and "Fire Down Below" have shown Seagal's age.\n"Exit Wounds" stands as Seagal's biggest failure, a pitiful reminder of the death of the American action film. By overextending the violence, the ludicrousness and the sheer improbability of everything, "Exit Wounds" plays out like a circus of the damned with Tom Arnold working the Tilt-A-Whirl. It's always a bad sign when Arnold's attempts at comedy are the most memorable parts of a film.\nSeagal plays Orin Boyd, a burned-out cop who gets reassigned to a tough Detroit precinct after saving the vice president's life. But this precinct is filled with police officers who use the gym way too much, use stun guns in strange naked homoerotic bonding moments and routinely steal heroin from police labs. Then there's DMX, the hardcore rapper-turned-actor who does a better job in his music videos than his role as a stereotypical drug dealer/club owner/martial arts master/dot-com entrepreneur. Seagal and DMX team up to stop the corrupt cop ring.\nThe gratuitous violence of "Exit Wounds" would have made Peckinpah cringe and reach for the stop button on the remote. In earlier Seagal films, viewers got brief moments of violence that made the films memorable and not so gory. "Exit Wounds" overflows with carnage -- people bloodied by chain-wrapped fists, body parts being impaled and people being crushed by cars and buses.\nThe biggest disappointment of the film is the misuse of Seagal. Instead of having Seagal demonstrate his speed and prowess, he ends up being nothing more than a patsy, used to connect the dots of all the inane plot points in what stands as a truly rotten film.