A DANGEROUS MAN

CONTAINS BANG BANG BANG BANG SOME SPOILERS

This month's Steven Seagal offering is pretty much along the level of the last half dozen cheapo shoot-em-ups he's done: a good man in a bad world, trying to do the right thing while surrounded with varying shades of unspeakable nastiness. Except that, rather like The Hulk, Big Steve tends to be calm and rational, calm and rational, until he snaps and goes absolutely mental.

A Dangerous Man (harking back to his glory days of three-word titles that summed up his character - Above The Law, Hard To Kill etc) is actually slightly better than I'd expected: there are a couple of funny lines and the fighting isn't quite as incoherently shot. Our hero, a former Special Forces man fresh out of prison for a crime he didn't commit, inadvertently witnesses a killing and is drawn into an elaborate but frankly dull conflict between two groups of Chinese gangsters, the Russian Mafia and some corrupt cops. As the various factions come together there is the annoying tendency to cut back on the mano-a-mano fisticuffs and just have people emptying machine guns at one another. A hell of a lot of ammo gets spent in this movie, most of it fired into walls and cars and thin air, and only a few bullets actually finding their target.

It's all very noisy and at no time is it remotely worth caring about; apart from some moments of wanton excess in the violence department as bones crunch loudly on the soundtrack, there's not much to see here.

**