If we were to give one small piece of advice to everybody’s favorite over weight Aikido master, that being Steven Seagal, it would only be keep doing what you’re doing but you might want to lose the love scenes in your future movies. You see, while we all appreciate that Mr. Seagal seems to have an affinity towards young beautiful women, with these ladies all being virtually perfect packing 3% body fat, we don’t necessarily appreciate the fact that his love scenes with these women usually involve them being buck ass naked having coital fun with a fully clothed Steven Seagal… usually wearing an overcoat. We understand the alternative is for Seagal to get naked as well and CLEARLY we do not want to see that either which is why make the humble suggestion that my man just excises these scenes from his movies completely. Or have the skinny stuntman double substitute in those scenes too, though we know that’s not gonna happen. Anyway today’s movie is ‘Born to Raise Hell’ in which Mr. Seagal flips the script by mumbling his lines and kicking much ass.

The Action Movie Name Generator has kicked out Samuel Axel as the character for Seagal to absorb this time around, a super badass special agent badass for the International Drug Task Force (IDTF). It seems our government has decided to attack terrorism from the back door, that being sending crack agents to Romania bust up drug rings which in turn will end terrorism. I’m rolling with it and suggest you just do the same.

Axel is hot on the trail of Russian mobster Dmitri (Dan Badaru), a peaceful family man who simply wants to sell drugs and shoot informants in the head. That’s all. Recently Dimitri has formed a tenuous drug partnership with the violent home invading rapist gypsy Costel (Darren Shahlavi) who runs the sweetest club in all of Bucharest which features ultra fine women dancing nasty, getting naked and fire breathing. That’s my kind of party baby.

Circumstance has kind of forced Axel and his partner Steve (D. Neil Mark) to shift focus from Dmitri and concentrate on Costel who is causing quite a ruckus in Romania, even though we haven’t really seen anything as of yet that relates to terrorism. About Steve the partner… he took time out of this busy movie to let us know that his wife is eight months pregnant and he’d really like to make it home to see the birth of his child. I know… I know…

This Costel character is a really bad dude because in addition to being a whirling Kung Fu master, he has done some bad things, things so bad that now he has a super angry and pissed off Dmitri looking to kill his ass. Worst still Costel has done somebody really close to Axel mortal harm, we’re not going to tell you who, and now he has Axel hot on his ass as well. Costel knows kung fu and moves like the wind. Axel knows kung fu and moves like a sixty year old man who has seen better days. The impending martial arts battle is going to be EXPLOSIVE. Or not.

The good news about ‘Born to Raise Hell’ is that with this movie Steven Seagal continues his hot streak. Now by hot streak we don’t mean a Will Smith type hot streak of movies grossing 100 million dollars, or a streak of movies being hugely entertaining… though we did mightily enjoy us ‘A Dangerous Man’ … but a hot streak of making movies that haven’t been suicide inducing. In fact since releasing ‘Attack Force’, a film so bad it could be used a real weapon to fight terrorism, Seagal’s last dozen movies have all been semi-tolerable, with some such as the aforementioned ‘A Dangerous Man’ even being up for ‘good’ consideration. ‘Born to Raise Hell’, which is just a terrible title which means absolutely nothing in this movie, isn’t all that bad as far as these things go but it just doesn’t do much to set itself apart from any other generic Straight to DVD action movie.

Everything I think one would want or expect in Seagal action movie is on display featuring lots of Seagal close quarter fast hand action with legs getting broken and broken noses getting thrust up into folks brains, lots of Eastern European women get naked and the few who that don’t at least had the common decency to dress like complete tramps. There’s car chases, fist fights, ‘love scenes’, plot holes and bad ADR… just what we’d expect from a Seagal joint. The one story element that was kind of different turned out to be pretty okay, that being enemies uniting for a common cause, largely made decent because of Dan Badaru’s ice cold performance as Dmitri.

Still, director Lauro Chartrand might want to chill on the slo-mo and music video style cuts as it got real tiresome real early in this movie, and anybody looking for a big fight between martial artists should know better by now. Ever since ‘Under Siege 2’ I learned that Seagal has it written in his contract that all of his fight scenes be completely one sided carnage fests where the bad guy simply serves the purpose of being a receptacle of face punches.

I guess it’s comforting to know that showing up in a big time movie like ‘Machete’ and having a weekly television show hasn’t detoured Steven Seagal from doing what he was put on this earth to do, that being flooding the earth with completely mediocre, run of the mill action flicks. As Thanksgiving has recently come and gone… this we are thankful for.