This is Steven Seagal’s second move, released two years after his debut (Above The Law).
This movie (Hard To Kill) is very simplistic in plot, but it contains much of the good action that Steven Seagal is known & loved for.
The plot is basically, Seagal playing a cop called Mason Storm, who films a senator doing a dodgy deal, then they come after him and his family, killing his wife and putting him into a coma. Mason Storm recovers, with the help of a friend from Internal Affairs (Lt Kevin O’Malley, played alright by Frederick Coffin), who also finds and protects his son. Seagal then finds a new girlfriend and attempts to expose the corruption while staying alive and also keeping his new girlfriend alive (they don’t know his son is alive until near the end of the movie). Plenty of bungling baddies with guns come after him since they discover he’s still alive, and Seagal generally beats them all up as he meets them, with his gun or empty handed. That’s pretty much the entire plot in a nutshell.
Just like in Above The Law, Seagal’s character here in Hard To Kill is a bit more charming & polite – more vulnerable, less “badass”, compared to his later movies after he made the big time with Under Siege about two years after this one.
This movie also features some classic Aikido movies during some of its fight scenes, as well as having several generic training scenes such as punching a wooden post, and doing kata-type moves in thin air.
Steven Seagal’s naughty antics are also in full effect here, as he takes every opportunity to grope both of his women in this movie while filming romantic scenes with them. Especially the first one, where Bonnie Burroughs plays his wife Felicia Storm who gets murdered in the first few minutes of the movie. Bonnie has retrospectively spoken up about how Seagal behaved inappropriately towards her, including how he inappropriately touched her to “help her get on top of him” as they rehearsed and re-shot that scene several times. Apparently there was no Intimacy Coordinator in those days, like there are these days, enduring such romantic scenes are not breaching anyone’s expectations and making them uncomfortable. The second romantic scene was a bit less naughty, and that was with his then real-life wife, Kelly LeBrock who plays the lead female in this movie – the nurse who helps Seagal escape the hospital and recover. LeBrock was well known for starring in Weird Science (1985), then Seagal somehow managed to marry her in 1987 before his Hollywood debut in 1988. She was his third wife, and stayed with him till 1996, around the time of all the drama on the set of Executive Decision where he was killed off earlier than originally planned, never to be welcomed back to that level of Hollywood again.