This was one actually disappointing, if you can believe that. For one to be disappointed, one has to have some kind of expectations. For instance, I am disappointed in the Detroit Pistons for losing to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2007 NBA conference finals as I fully expected them to win. On the other hand, I am not disappointed in the 2006 Detroit Lions for winning only 3 games last season as my expectations weren’t much greater than that. So for me to be disappointed in Steven Seagal’s Yakuza film ‘Into the Sun’ would mean that somehow, someway I expected something more out of it. In all honesty, who would be to blame for this disappointment? Seagal for making yet another supremely crappy DTV action flick, or me for somehow expecting this to be entertaining? I afraid the blame lays squarely with me my friends.

Seagal plays… you know, does it really matter who Seagal plays? As we have discussed in previous reviews concerning this master thespian, he is INCAPABLE of adopting another character except the mumbling pony tailed badass. INCAPABLE! Rant aside, we meet Seagal in some Asian jungle about to kill up some dudes. One of the reasons I held out some hope for this one early on is that his jungle warrior partner was none other than Hiesman trophy winner and former NFL stud Eddie George. Cool, because Eddie looks like he should be an action movie star anyway. Eddie gets shot up pretty quick. So much for Eddie. Okay, so that first jungle part was worthless and had NO bearing on the movie, which now begins with an unholy collaboration between Evil Yakuza gangsta Kuroda (Takao Osawa) and Evil Triad gangsta Chen (Ken Lo) who have plan to move massive amounts of Blow by stuffing it into Tuna. Kuroda has also killed a high ranking government official as it had something to do with illegal aliens or something, but will have no bearing on anything to do with this movie as it wears on. Anyway, the United States Government brings Yakuza expert Seagal on the case because he’s going to do what he does and have those Yakuza Triad bastards choking on their own blood in due time.

I had to truncate the description because we should really focus on the high level of lameness in this film.

Stupid Thing 01: The introduction of a junior FBI agent as Seagals ‘partner’. He doesn’t know the language, he doesn’t know the customs, he has no discernable skills and is obviously there for comic relief but he’s not funny. Apparently the producers thought he was stupid too because they killed him off fairly quickly leading to…

Stupid Thing 02: Stupid junior agent investigates something, Triad and Yakuza dude find him, beat him senseless and dump cocaine all over him. Triad dude snaps the idiots neck. Yakuza dude looks at Triad dude like he’s nuts and asks him why he killed him. Excuse me? We just exposed our entire operation to this dude and dumped 50kg worth of blow on his grill and you planned to let him go on home? Keep in mind that the Yakuza dude has already killed like 50 people already, and he asks some other cat if HE’S crazy.

Stupid Thing 03: Seagal busts in and kills Kuroda’s men and makes it look like the Yakuza brass did it so the brass will get involved. That’s fine, but I guess they forgot the scene just before when the Yakuza brass had a meeting saying they were going to get involved and kill Kuroda and his men.

Stupid Thing 04: In Japan you can apparently just walk up to a Yakuza Big Boss, in his crib no less, and pump him full of lead with NO interference. If so, there’s a local Yakuza boss who’s been getting on my damn nerves and I’m on my way to his crib right now!

Stupid Thing 05: INCREDIBLY lame love sequence between Seagal and actress Eve Masatoh who either seriously can’t act or finds Steven Seagal completely repulsive. Plus the lame love scene was only used so we could justify killing her later on.

Stupid Thing 06: Me taking time to list stupid things.

Cool things in ‘Into the Sun’? Actress Pace Wu is awesome. Not only is she damned good looking, but if she’s not an accomplished swords person, she fakes it quite well and was woefully underused in this movie. Actor Kosuke Toyohara as the samurai / tattoo artist (?) also has some heroic qualities and possesses screen presence as an actor and was woefully underused in this movie. Eddie George was action movie ready the day he left college for the NFL and was woefully underused in this movie. Seagal shows us his language skills by speaking Japanese through a lot of the film, but he mumbles in that dialect too, so I’m pretty sure they didn’t know what the hell he was talking about either.  Using Japan as a backdrop was cool and even though the score ripped off Hans Zimmer’s ‘Black Rain’ it was still kind of sweet. Oh, and I GOTTA get me on of those huge fish tanks like the one in the restaurant that Seagal went to. I just need to know where you find the naked Japanese women to stock it with.

The fact that ‘Into the Sun’ had so much working into its favor, but was still filled with dead lulls, stupidity, slowness, boredom and lifelessness just brought me disappointment and sadness. I didn’t expect this to be ‘The Seven Samurai’ or anything, I just hoped to be mildly entertained, and in that it wasn’t even close.