With 1994's On Deadly Ground Steven Seagal Got Dead Serious About Ripping Off Billy Jack and its Various Heavy-Handed Messages
Because of the curious nature of my career I am familiar with Steven Seagal as an actor. I know him as a screenwriter. I am cognizant of his skills as a martial artist and a lawman. But I also know him as a novelist. That’s because I wrote about his debut novel, The Way of the Shadow Wolves, for this website in a piece that was later collected in my book The Joy of Trash.
I am fascinated by Seagal at his worst and most embarrassing so The Way of the Shadow Wolves rocked my world. It’s a Q-friendly conspiracy thriller about wise Native American lawmen living in perfect harmony with nature and exposing the Obama-Cartel-Jihad alliance of evil threatening our very way of life.
At one point in The Way of the Shadow Wolves the hero colorfully threatens a bad guy by explaining, “Billy Jack was a fictional character who kicked dumb shits, uh, like you, in the nuts. He did that in a lot of his movies.”
I have seen all of the Billy Jack movies and at no point in any of them does he kick any dumb shits in the nuts. He doesn’t kick ANYONE in the nuts, dumb shit or otherwise.
I was not surprised to discover that Seagal is a Billy Jack guy. We’re a rare, unfortunate breed, us Billy Jack cultists. My fascination with Billy Jack is largely ironic and sociological. I am utterly fascinated by the Billy Jack series as a bona fide pop culture phenomenon that can legitimately claim to have changed pop culture and film forever yet has been all but forgotten except for the curious likes of myself and Mr. Seagal.
There appears to be nothing at all ironic or tongue-in-cheek about Seagal’s Billy Jack worship, however. There’s something about the power fantasy at the core of Tom Laughlin’s tonally incoherent surprise blockbuster that appeals to narcissists like On Deadly Ground’s director.
The Way of the Shadow Wolves is shameless in its blatant theft from Billy Jack. That is unsurprisingly also true of Seagal’s poorly received 1994 directorial debut On Deadly Ground.
In my recent piece on Seagal’s notorious episode of Saturday Night Live—Lorne Michaels has singled Seagal out as the worst host in the show’s history, and that includes noted murderers Robert Blake and O.J. Simpson—I wrote about how, when he appeared in The Onion Movie as Cock Puncher he told my friend, who had co-written the screenplay, that there were important messages in all of his films and he wanted to know what the important message of Cock Puncher was.
That might seem ridiculous. Seagal makes movies with titles like Marked for Death, after all, not Gandhi. Yet it makes sense within the context of On Deadly Ground and Seagal’s Billy Jack worship because Tom Laughlin really was all about shoving heavy-handed social messages down audience’s throats.
Tom Laughlin’s heart lie in the five minute monologue on the importance of issuing municipal bonds to fund alternative forms of energy. The martial arts was just a way of getting kids through the door so they can enjoy lectures on a wide variety of subjects.
This also helps explain why Seagal thought that he could get away with ending the film with a monologue about the environment that, depending on where you look, ran anywhere between eleven and forty minutes. American studio movies do not end with the lead character delivering an endless speech about subject matter important to them. But that’s exactly what you’ll find in Billy Jack movies.
This is particularly true of The Trial of Billy Jack, where Laughlin leveraged the almost unbelievable success of Billy Jack to angrily demand complete control en route to making one of the most self-indulgent pieces of pop culture in American history.
Seagal thought he was in a similar place to make demands when On Deadly Ground was green-lit. The glowering pony-tail enthusiast and famously terrible human being was coming off his biggest critical and commercial success in the 1992 hit Under Siege.
The Out for Justice star was at the height of his popularity. In Hollywood tradition, what Seagal really wanted to do was direct. He got his chance with 1994’s On Deadly Ground, which casts him as Forrest Taft, a badass killing machine who has sold out for a fat three hundred and fifty thousand dollar payday with Michael Jennings (Michael Caine), the wealthy CEO of Aegis Oil, a powerful force for evil in the universe.
Caine, who apparently replaced Jeremy Irons, favors Bolo ties and looks like his hair was drawn onto his head with a black Sharpie. In keeping with the film’s complete dearth of moral ambiguity Caine’s big baddie stops just short of drinking the blood of baby seals on camera to telegraph his cartoonish evil.
In On Deadly Ground the world of the white man is one of greed and destruction, exploitation and spiritual corruption. It’s all about sucking the environment dry and leaving it a flaming husk.
This is in sharp contrast to the Native people of Alaska, who live in a state of perfect harmony with the universe but need a white guy extremely adept at kicking people and blowing things up to save them.
Even more than Billy Jack, On Deadly Ground is a shameless white savior narrative because Billy Jack was at least half Native-American. Forrest, in sharp contrast, is all white and all right but to put things in wrestling turns he needs to make a babyface turn because he starts off the film in the wrong place spiritually.
Even when he’s ostensibly a bad guy he’s a force for good. The great character actor Mike Starr has a memorable cameo as a tough guy at a bar who makes the mistake of antagonizing an Inuit alcoholic in explicitly racist terms. The bad guys are EXTREMELY racist here in case there’s any doubt that they are not great human beings.
Forrest is so mad that he beats up the entire bar. Then he comes back and beats up Starr’s humiliated bully in an unnecessarily involved, gimmicky way before ultimately giving him a bit of spiritual guidance to help him lead a more enlightened existence.
Forrest realizes that he also needs to lead a more moral existence. For example he needs to stop working for the literal Anti-Christ on an environmentally calamitous project that promises to do horrible things to the untamed wilds of Alaska.
Caine’s oil mogul arch-villain must finish a project within a specific amount of time or the land rights go back to the Intuit and he isn’t shy about killing people to make sure that doesn’t happen.
This extends to blowing up Forrest. In their bid to keep their evil chicanery a secret they blow Forrest up but good but, to borrow the title of a previous Seagal vehicle, he proves hard to kill.
Getting blown up doesn’t kill Forrest but it REALLY irritates him. It annoys him. It cheeses him off. He doesn’t like it one bit, buster!
Getting blown up grinds Forrest’s gears so badly that he embarks on a spiritual quest that could have been stolen shot by shot from a nearly identical sequence in Billy Jack although Laughlin was thankfully too much of a square to fill his esoteric vision quest with the naked breasts of adoring native women. Not Seagal!
The explosion that was supposed to kill Forrest was very big and very fiery. But Forrest has a sacred destiny he must fulfill. He is found by the Inuit, who nurse him back to health and tell him of his sacred obligation to go back and murder everyone even vaguely associated with the evil oil company, including minor shareholders, secretaries and janitorial staff.
It honestly, seems a little excessive.
Caine is scared shitless of Seagal’s superhuman powers so he dispatches a team of mercenaries led by R. Lee Ermey to take care of him.
Ermey’s hardened warrior says of the character played by the director, “My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we're dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can't fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He's the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire!
You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he's going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy's a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we're all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska.”
Wow! What a badass! I wouldn’t want to mess with someone like that. He sounds tough!
When Forrest approaches the oil rig at the climax henchmen flee in terror rather than risk getting murdered by the big man with the girly pony-tail. Forrest reaches the rig and soon the bad guys are nothing but a big goddamned hole in the middle of Alaska.
Then comes the good part: Steven Seagal delivers a four minute monologue on the evils of the oil industry and gas-belching cars.
Seagal talks and talks and talks. And then he talks some more. But where Billy Jack’s speeches were impressively insane, and could only have come from the mind of Tom Laughlin, Seagal’s film-closing speech is preachy, overwrought yet fairly generic.
That said, what sets On Deadly Ground apart from the rest of Seagal’s oeuvre, beyond a ridiculously stacked cast that also includes John C. McGinley, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Billy Bob Thornton and animal superstar Bart the Bear, is its mind-blowing self-indulgent and deeply personal nature.
Though it somehow grossed over seventy million dollars worldwide, On Deadly Ground was widely perceived as a deeply embarrassing flop for its director-star. It’s a true vanity project that afforded its star an opportunity to cosplay as a contemporary Billy Jack. The results are memorable for all the wrong reasons but they are memorable.
On Deadly Ground marked the beginning of a steep professional decline for Seagal that is still ongoing thirty years and countless bad movies later.
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