Next stop China in a story about an archaeologist framed for murder who exacts revenge. The overall production is poor with many inconsistencies in the story logic. The characters are not established properly at the beginning so what follows isn't coherent drama. There are changes in tone too which invites ridicule, such as a monkey-style kung-fu fighter walk on a wall - audiences are not prepared for this diversion. Many of the acting performaces are below par. It also has obvious dubbing and obvious stand-in work for the action sequences.

You know when you want a degree there are course you have to take just because someone thinks they are important. This is one of those required to complete your degree in Seagalology. Think of it an as ordeal you must get through to pass.There is not noble purpose here. Seagal is just out for revenge on those who killed his wife (Kata Dobó). He is up against a Chinese syndicate that reminds us every 10 minutes that "This Gwilo professor is becoming a problem" after each of their 10 henchmen die at Seagal's hands.DEA agents Michelle Goh and Corey Johnson are following the trail of blood, but they don't want to arrest him until he finishes.Lots of blood and martial arts, but nothing else.There one more done.

It is good to see Seagal at work. No matter what his debt to the mob he still is fun to watch. I like movies without too much tension, where I know the good guy wins. So for my simple tastes the movie was fun.Years ago, I thought Seagal had the fastest hands in martial arts movies. Unfortunately, he has not received the recognition that other martial arts stars have.Many times a star is the same personality in all his or her movies. Such as John Wayne or Chackie Chan. It just becomes a matter of what stars you can identify with. When Arnold says, " I'll be back!" You have to be glad he is coming back.

This is a film which asks its audience to accept that Steven Seagal is "Yale's most distinguished academic". An interesting idea for a competition might be to ask people to try and come up with a more egregious example of miscasting than that one. John Wayne as a drag queen? Woody Allen as a heavyweight boxing champion? Arnold Schwarzenegger as a seven-stone weakling? How about Steven Seagal as the world's greatest actor? Actually, even asking the audience to accept Seagal as a moderately competent actor might be a bit much. Make no mistake, this is a bad film indeed. It only gets a second star because it never quite plumbs the awesome depths of badness achieved by Seagal's other 2003 film with director Michael Oblowitz, "The Foreigner". The seventeenth-century poet John Dryden, comparing his detested rival Thomas Shadwell with other minor literary figures of the day, wrote:-"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence But Shadwell never deviates into sense". A similar distinction applies here. Whereas "The Foreigner" never deviates into sense, or comes within a thousand miles of doing so, "Out for a Kill" does at least make pretence to some faint meaning. Seagal's character, Robert Burns, is Professor of Archaeology at Yale University. (Burns was originally a master thief specialising in stealing Chinese antiquities, and gained his degree while serving a prison sentence. I doubt if in real life Yale would have awarded a professorship to a man with this particular curriculum vitae, but the film is presumably set in a parallel universe where seats of learning are happy to offer academic chairs to convicted felons). While on a dig in a remote part of China, he unwittingly becomes embroiled with a gang of drug-runners and he is framed on false charges of narcotics smuggling and the murder of his assistant, who was shot dead by the gang. He is released from jail by a Chinese cop (named Tommy despite being female) and her American colleague who hope that, back in America, he will lead them to the criminal masterminds behind the drug-smuggling operation. Unfortunately, the villains have not finished with Burns, and his wife is killed by a bomb intended for him. He sets out to get revenge, and the film turns into the normal Seagal mixture of gunplay and martial-arts sequences. It was ironically appropriate that in "The Foreigner" Seagal played a character named Jonathan Cold, because his performance seemed to come straight from the deep freeze. Perhaps he and Oblowitz recognised this unfortunate irony, because in "Out for a Kill" his character has a surname suggestive of heat rather than coldness. His style of acting, however, remains as frozen as ever. Burns suffers a series of disasters to rival the Book of Job, but neither being imprisoned on false charges, nor the destruction of his home, nor the murder of his wife, can elicit any degree of emotional reaction from him. Not that the rest of the cast are any better. In "Under Siege" Seagal made the mistake of playing against a major Hollywood star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose acting skills served to underline his own deficiencies in that direction. At least he avoids that mistake here. The way in which the villains are played implies a racist view of the Chinese, little changed since the days of those old Fu Manchu movies. The main difference is that the criminal mastermind Wong Dai is played by a Chinese actor instead of Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee, but the impression is still given that the entire Chinese race, except for attractive women like Tommy, consists of fiendish Oriental villains. About all one can say in the film's defence is that some of the martial-arts sequences are reasonably well done. Overall, however, this is the sort of cheap, shoddy and racist actioner which I had hoped Hollywood had given up making years ago. 2/10