ATTACK FORCE is the latest in a long line of straight-to-video trash movies from Steven Seagal, the action star who once wowed audiences with a string of hard-hitting, pull-no-punches thrillers that offered tons of entertainment for his dedicated fan base and beyond. Nowadays, Seagal is something of a joke in industry circles, and fans of the former Hollywood star tend to watch his films with a sense of amusement rather than excitement. This movie does nothing to break the downward spiral and indeed it's even worse than some of his more recent fare.Like most of his films made in the 2000s, this one was filmed in Eastern Europe – Romania, to be precise – and tells a fumbled storyline about Seagal and his buddies tracking down people with superhuman powers and killing them. Of course, there's some martial arts action, but Seagal is doubled as always and usually appears in the shadows to hide his massive weight gain. There are some familiar cases in the cast, but that's only because the actors have starred in B-movies before, although there are a lot of British ex-soap actors here from the likes of EASTENDERS and DOCTOR, for some reason.It's not that these are really bad films or unwatchable, just that they sort of pass over the viewer, leaving them with a totally unexcited, 'eh' feeling. It's nearly as bad as watching paint dry, although not quite. This film's worst offence isn't the bad directing, editing or acting, which makes a change: it's the storyline. Halfway through, it is said, the producers of this decided to change the storyline from being about vampires to being about a new strain of drug. The problem is, it's obvious that the baddies are vampires, even if shots of pointy teeth have been removed. There's a fair bit of splashy gore as throats are slashed and even some creepy eye effects as well as people being chucked through walls and the like. If the producers decided against the vampire storyline because they thought it would make their movie too unbelievable, it didn't work.The major problem this decision brought was that half of Seagal's dialogue changed, but he couldn't come back for post production to alter it, so he's got a voice double as well as a body double. His voice double sounds nothing like him, so listening to this film makes for a bizarre experience. As for the action, it's over-edited into blurry nonsense, although I got a kind of masochistic kick out of the 'baddie's lair' climax. For the main, ATTACK FORCE is on par with the equally poor SHADOW MAN from the same year.

Plot Synopsis: Three members of an US Special Forces team are killed in their hotel room by a woman they had brought with them for some fun. Their boss, Commander Marshall Lawson, tries to track down the killer, only to find that the woman was infected by CTX, a substance created by a covert arm of the US military in order to turn ordinary people into mindless killers. With government agents after him, Lawson teams up with the scientist who created CTX in order to stop the spread of the substance.The Review: After the modest success of his debut film ABOVE THE LAW, Steven Seagal has spent the early half of the 1990s making action films, his career reaching its zenith with UNDER SIEGE. Like most action heroes of the era, Seagal's popularity dropped down a couple of notches (he tried to regain favour with the public by making a couple of films where he attempted to reinvent himself as a crusader for the environment), resulting in his career becoming stuck in a rut. Aside from a couple of modestly budgeted action flicks, Seagal found himself in the same arena as his arch-nemesis Jean-Claude Van Damme – the DTV market.Starting with THE FOREIGNER in 2002, the third era of Seagal's career began. From The Foreigner right up to FLIGHT OF FURY, Seagal made a whole heap of B-grade action films where he played a government agent (or ex-government mercenary, secret agent or CIA spook) out to avenge a friend's murder, stop terrorists from committing some nefarious scheme or unravel a government conspiracy. In all these films, Seagal goes about dispatching evildoers with brutal aikido moves & / or gunplay (in real life, Seagal is quite a crack shot with a pistol) while wearing a long black leather coat that he never takes off (possibly in a vain attempt to hide the pot belly he gained). Most of these films do not make any attempt to advance Seagal's career or even elevate themselves above the flood of DTV action films that have come out in the early-to-mid 2000s. Of these, Attack Force is the worst.On a technical standpoint, Attack Force is pretty standard stuff as far as these things go. The action set-pieces are competently conducted, although they do tread on absurdity, with people being thrown through brick walls. Seagal does the usual rounds of being a military Special Forces commander with access to a top-secret military operation, something that is only hinted at, slicing his way through baddies with a pair of blades attached to his wrists.Where Attack Force fails is in its scripting department – the story featured here is only the start of the film's woes. Seagal might be a decent action star but when it comes to writing, his characters range from absurdly defined stereotypes to faceless ones. Here the flaw is at its most magnified, with Seagal writing himself into a deep hole by featuring some real half-cocked military conspiracies involving some kind of drug that turns people into mindless killers; some fine examples of 'faceless' intelligence agents out to silence Seagal by sending entire strike teams after him & his men; a central villain who is not seen until the very end & so forth (don't get me started on the film's title, which is ridiculously generic to say the least).While some of Seagal's films also featured banal writing, most particularly The Foreigner, they also had something else to offset these problems (usually plenty of plot twists & some real clever kills on Seagal's behalf, as well as slick direction by the various directors involved). Here none of those things apply – Attack Force is not only stuck with an incompetent writing team & poor direction but reeks of laziness as far as the story goes – not only is the villain's motivation for committing his evil plan ill-defined, the hero's motivation for tracking the villain down is attributed to mere coincidence – Seagal's team is killed by a hooker who has been infected by CTX by Adam Croasdell's villain as part of an experiment. There are also some unnecessary digital effects of victims having their eyes blink sideways, which doesn't make a lick of sense biologically.When it comes to acting, Seagal goes through the motions with the same one-dimensional performance that he has made a career out of, but minus the self-righteousness that he displayed in most of his films. None of the other actors make anything even resembling a performance or even an impression. Speaking of Seagal, I noticed something strange – Seagal has had his voice dubbed over in half the scenes. Rumour has it that the film's plot was changed after shooting had ended. This makes the film quite dishonest.

This is without a shadow of a doubt the absolute worst movie Steven Seagal has ever made. And that says a lot. Don't get fooled by the rating, it's way too good. This abomination hadn't even been worthy of a 0/10 rating, if such a thing existed. Absolutely no plot Worst action scenes ever, and there aren't too many of them either Seagal doesn't do anything himself, including the fighting, talking (lots of dubbing), and so on. As always. Seagal is fat, lazy and couldn't care less about this movie. Something which is very obvious all the way throughTake all the other garbage DTV movies Seagal has made, multiply them with each other, multiply this with a thousand billions, and all the badness you then get won't even describe 1 % of this absolute crapfest.

Another Seagal cheapo shot in Romania. Almost all scenes play in total darkness which made it even cheaper than the others I guess, but it's the best thing about the movie because it adds a certain horror movie feeling. At the beginning, it seems to be only a crime story: Commander Lawson (Seagal) loses his team to a female killer. He finds out she is addicted to a new drug called CTX, a trace that leads him to the chemist Tia (Lisa Lövbrand) and the dealer Aroon (Adam Croasdell, best actor in this movie!). While the body-count is rising, everything becomes more and more bizarre and turns into an apocalyptic fight for survival. Despite the annoying hand-held camera shaking around for no purpose, "Attack Force" does have a couple of good bad moments. It just seems everyone somehow lost interest while making it. If it was more to the point, it could have been worthwhile. Maybe it lacked a stronger director to push everybody a bit and iron out the bugs?