Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

After watching the first of the Steven Seagal ‘True Justice’ television shows turned into a feature film, ‘Deadly Crossing’, I figured… incorrectly… that the producers were releasing the movie simply as a teaser of sorts before airing the actual show on Spike or Versus or wherever they planned to run it. Based on that, I thought ‘Deadly Crossing’ was okay as a TV show, though as a movie was certainly lacking, but I would watch the TV show when it aired. Well, it’s not going to be a TV show, and apparently the remaining shows are being strung together to make feature films. It barely worked with ‘Deadly Crossing’ but it didn’t work at all with this particular ‘True Justice’ movie ‘Street Wars’.

One of the opening scenes of this film shows our main bad guy in the ring completely eviscerating his sparring partner with his awesome Mixed Martial Arts skills. That’s funny. It’s funny because we know this film is going to end with Elijah Kane (Steven Seagal) and this guy going one on one and despite all of this cats skill, and training, and high fitness level… he’s not even going to land a punch. We know this already. Why even bother wasting our time showing what a badass he is?

The case today for Elijah and his crew of super cops is to find out who is giving the Seattle Rave population these bad ecstasy pills that are making them go belly up. We see the crew descend on a club to make a bust, we see some dude run off who is obviously skilled in the art of Parkour as we watch him run and jump and climb like a circus monkey, we observe cops Andre (William Stewart) and Sarah (Sarah Lind) do their best to give chase but alas it takes their over the hill, overweight boss to catch this guy. While it looked like this cat ran like eight miles in this sequence, Elijah walked all of a half block to cut him off. I guess that’s the way it is when you know the streets. And that’s the second guy in this sequence Elijah beat near to death, completely violating his civil rights.

So there’s this guy selling these bad drugs, the plan being to label one drug as bad so his drugs can move in as the ‘good drug’ and make a killing, even though it simply looks to me that this guy is just killing off his clients. But I’m not an international drug dealer, so what would I know?

But that’s not the whole of it, oh no. There’s a young drug selling dude in jail who has some critical info, there’s this guys father who won’t tell the bad people where his drug selling son is which has gotten him kidnapped, there’s a powerful mobster in New York City who wants Elijah Kane dead for crimes he has perceived committed against him, there’s a documentary crew in town that Elijah has to protect, and Andre’s pregnant wife has left him, and he has asthma, and he has 40 pounds of C4 strapped to his ass. Oh yeah, and the fight between the badass and Elijah Kane. We’re not going worry about that.

The problem with ‘Street Wars’, a problem that feels way more pronounced than it was with ‘Deadly Crossing’, is that this is clearly two TV episodes stitched together to make a movie. It’s has two complete, loosely linked story lines with two completely different sets of characters in two separate halves of a movie. We didn’t even have time to tell you about the murdered DEA agent plot point, mainly because it’s just wasted space, but it was cool to watch Elijah confront the perpetrator of this crime, with no backup, his gun holstered and armed only with tough talk but still managed to melt that bitch in a pool of melting sissy.

Again, since this is a TV show, two TV shows, there are far too many characters to keep track off, too many cliffhanging commercial breaks that never had commercials, the continued overreliance on flashes, freeze frames, and other equilibrium destroying post production maneuvers, the movie had two climaxes… yeah that’s good in sex, but bad in drama… and we also had to suffer through character subplots which would be semi-interesting to keep track of in a weekly serial, but subplots you could care less about in feature film considering they will be nowhere near getting resolved.

The truth is even as two separate TV shows this pair would probably be among the weaker episodes in the ‘True Justice’ series, but as a movie… I am afraid it was only good at providing very little of nothing. I did say after watching ‘Deadly Crossing’ I would at least tune in to watch future episodes of the TV show, but after ‘Street Wars’ I think I’d be looking for this series to get cancelled.