This is the fourth movie in Steven Seagal’s career, and within just a few minutes it’s already clear that this is a better composed movie than his last one.
Out For Justice (1991) is an alright movie by Seagal’s standards – some would even say he’s in his prime here. This movie gets more fun as it develops, and has some really nice touches throughout. It builds towards the ending quite well, while having a decent level of screenplay, budget and supporting actors involved, and things generally seem coordinated to a basic standard, unliked Marked For Death which was all over the place.
In this Warner Bros movie, Steven Seagal plays a senior Brooklyn cop who wears his own clothes and knows the area and its people better than anyone else. When his best friend, Detective Bobby Lupo, is killed in a busy street by a local nutcase on a rampage (called Richie Madano, played kind of adequately by William Forsythe), Seagal’s character Detective Gino Felino takes it personally and puts his life on hold to track down the killer.
With wacky country rock music and cringingly fake Brooklyn accents throughout, this movie is hardly a blockbuster, but it was still a step in the right direction towards helping Seagal secure his relatively huge next role in Under Siege (1992) which was objectively speaking, the peak of his career, according to most movie buffs, although true fans of Steven Seagal are just as happy with movies like Glimmer Man (1996) where he seems to have had more authority to do his own thing and bring his own vision to life albeit on a much humbler budget (after factoring in Seagal’s much higher personal salary since he was a much bigger star by this time).
Out For Justice is no masterpiece though. It’s very much like a boring slow drama, if you look past the action scenes. While it’s a clear step up from Marked For Death, it’s still very much lacking depth of script, and the entertainment value is quite turbulent with boons & lulls. There are no significant female roles in this movie either – there’s a plenty of similar female characters playing people’s wives & lovers, but none of them get much screen time here.
Seagal performs a bit better than usual in this movie – he’s quite active (not yet overweight) and does plenty of good Aikido in his fight scenes. He’s mentally on the ball, and physically in good shape too. He’s really putting in the effort required for him to deserve his big break in his fifth movie, Under Siege, which was released the following year. I reckon the producers of Under Siege were impressed by his screen charisma and took pity on him having such a basic plot to work with here in Out For Justice. It’s less disjointed than his previous movie Marked For Death but is still very one-dimensional, almost as if the game plan here was to simply wing it as let the story write itself as Seagal roams around interrogating and beating people up while looking for the killer. It’s the kind of story young kids might come up with at school. Seriously lacking in the plot department, but Steven still kind of makes it work as a mildly successful action hero flick.