Punching Day: Steven Seagal’s Out For Justice🌭

The first thing you need to know about Out for Justice is that Steven Seagal allegedly shit his pants on set.

In addition to being a Katamari Damaci of sexual misconduct allegations from the moment he arrived in Hollywood, Seagal is also notorious for intentionally hitting stuntpeople, including famed Jason Vorhees performer Kane Hodder and famed mixed martial artist Gene LeBell. This is because Seagal is a nuclear shithead, and he enjoys hitting people when they aren’t allowed to hit him back. If you’re a stuntperson on a blockbuster film headlined by Steven Seagal in 1991, Seagal can punch you in the face as hard as he wants, and if you react in any way except to whistle about how powerful he is, you’re going home without a job. As it happens, LeBell was the stunt coordinator on Out for Justice in 1991, and as the story goes, Seagal announced to the crew that because he was an Aikido master, it was physically impossible to choke him out. He wasn’t bragging that he could escape any hold, mind you – he was arguing that it simply could not be done.

You may recognize this as a thing that isn’t true, and so did Gene LeBell, because he’s a person with actual fight training instead of a dossier of lies he collected from G.I. Joe profile cards. You can choke out an elephant if your arms are thick enough, because it’s all about applying pressure in the correct places. No amount of “Aikido training” can trick your circulatory system into suddenly working differently. So, LeBell (allegedly) said, “I’ll test that out for you,” and proceeded to strangle Seagal into unconsciousness. Seagal, his (alleged) Aikido training having failed him, (allegedly) passed out, (allegedly) evacuating his bowels like his colon just received a bomb threat. He also sprayed himself down with piss from his frightened baby dick for good measure. Allegedly.

This story is like a sourcebook for the Steven Seagal roleplaying game. The information it contains is necessary to fully understand and enjoy his cinematic adventures, particularly Out for Justice. The 1991 action thriller stars Seagal as Detective Gino Felino, because he asked the writers to give him the most Italian name possible without using an actual slur. Like every other Seagal film released during the turquoise supernova of his stardom, it’s the story of a toxic asshole threatening to sue everyone in his personal orbit if they don’t pretend he’s the toughest dude in the world. It’s extremely presidential! This is the essence of Seagal – he’s a bully and a fabulist who lucked into a position of power, and now he gets to make movies about being a karate special forces mob detective even though I’m positive he doesn’t know karate. I am pretty sure he knows the mob, though. Steven Seagal is such a bully and is so obviously insecure about his “fighting ability” that he refuses to ever have his character be in any danger or be at a disadvantage in his films. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea for an action movie; see John Wick. But Seagal is also an imploding food truck of anti-charisma who never does anything fun or impressive in his action sequences. A Steven Seagal action sequence is a man moving as little as possible, followed by a bunch of people talking about how badass he is in defiance of reality itself. It’s like watching someone bribe the judges at a talent show. A child’s yellow belt ceremony would genuinely be more impressive. In fact, despite being the fourth film of Seagal’s career as a martial arts action star, there is not one frame of martial arts in this movie. Seagal’s “Aikido mastery” is a lot of shoving and wristlocks, mostly unleashed against people making no effort to defend themselves. He moves his feet as little as possible. He doesn’t throw a kick until the final reel, unless you count half a middle school dance move performed during a billiards melee, which would increase the total number of kicks in this action film to a generous 4. It’s like a musical where every song is exactly 30 seconds of Shatnering. Let me stress to readers who aren’t old enough to remember 1991 that Steven Seagal was pitched to action fans as another Bruce Lee – a guy who was pure lethal in real life, lending his mesmerizing talent to the world of cinematic storytelling. He also became popular at the tail end of an era when everyone on the planet was lying about being a mystical martial arts warrior, because the internet hadn’t been invented yet, so that kind of stuff couldn’t be instantly disproven the way it is today. Keep this context in mind as you continue reading.

The film starts with a title card featuring an Arthur Miller quote about neighborhoods.

Get right the fuck out of my face, I’m not looking at a book today. I’m specifically watching Out for Justice, the most anti-reading behavior you can engage in next to burning down a library. We’re then introduced to Seagal’s Gino Felino, and the moment he opens his mouth to make the sound he thinks an Italian cop from New York would make is like listening to a school shooting. I would’ve been less shocked if a cat spoke. My life will never be the same. He and his partner Bobby “The Snitch” Stoolini are staking something out for some reason, I wasn’t paying attention, when Gino notices a pimp punching the absolute shit out of a woman across the street. Gino bursts out of the stakeout van with his ponytail blowing in the wind like a bicycle streamer, juggling his gun in front of him like it’s a card trick he can’t wait to fucking ruin.

He’s gonna lowball the birthday boy’s parents and get rabbit hair in the ice cream. Better hope Grandma saved a gift receipt, because Undercover Detective Magician Gino Felino is going to set that Nintendo 64 on fire with half of a disappearing bird illusion. The rest of the cops are pissed, because Gino refused to ignore a felony assault in broad daylight and stick to the stakeout. There’s definitely some nuance to be played with here, in deciding whether to remain undercover and catch the more dangerous criminal or intervene and risk blowing the entire operation, but Steven Seagal doesn’t know that, and neither does Out For Justice. He just wants to shove a pimp while nerds cry about “procedure.” Gino spends exactly 8 seconds checking on the woman and then we are treated to our first fight scene. A Seagal fight scene is a repellent and formidable beast, like an extremely fat rat defending a hoard of garbage. As I mentioned earlier, Seagal’s goal is to completely humiliate his opponent while moving as little as possible, like Thwomp if Thwomp could somehow do its job without gravity. This is hard to accomplish without giving Seagal’s character the explicit power of telekinesis, so instead of making him look cool, it makes him look like a stationary object deflecting airborne debris in a windstorm. He’s a piece of gymnastics equipment for his stunt team to practice their flips. He doesn’t do a single martial art that doesn’t involve his opponent doing 98% of the work. I’d say this makes him the Hulk Hogan of action movies, but at least the Hulkster took some chair shots. Out for Justice’s inaugural pimpfight is no different. Gino’s first big maneuver is to clumsily throw the guy into some barrels, nearly losing his own balance in the process.

Then he plants his feet like a sweaty redwood and waits for the guy to blindly charge into a back body drop. It’s the kind of move you whip out when you’re playing with your nephews in a swimming pool, but Seagal isn’t allowed near children because he keeps filling out his Big Brother application with a list of moves he’d like to demonstrate on “the pupil,” so he has to wrestle pimps instead. We linger on a pair of fancy shoes amid the destruction, because fancy shoes are always funny.

Gino, having achieved his goal of beating someone’s entire ass while remaining mostly immobile, struts off as the opening titles explode onscreen. He’s Out for Justice, assholes!

A few scenes later, William Forsythe, the Magic: The Gathering avatar of getting picked up late from detention, marches up to Gino’s partner Bobby and blasts him 400 times in front of a bodega in the middle of the day.

He then drives 50 feet away to smoke a pile of crack and shoot a random woman in the face after she honks at him in traffic.

Forsythe is playing a gangster named Richie Madano, who is spiraling in a drug-fueled homicidal meltdown. This is not entirely his fault. He’s the villain in a Steven Seagal movie, which means he has to be more violent and impulsive than Steven Seagal. This is a tall task, so William Forsythe is trying to hit the ground running. Running is an activity Seagal hates, thus adding to Forsythe’s list of offenses as the film’s antagonist. Gino shows up to the murder scene in thirty percent Street Fighter cosplay, plus some medallions he got from a Food Lion vending machine. He looks like he was created by a six-year-old’s wish to be tough, which means that Seagal dressed himself for this scene.

I could write several hundred words on each piece of his outfit, so I will attempt to close some of that distance now. He’s pitching a sequel to Demolition Man called Jumping Jacks Man. He’s playing the detective in the dinner theater mystery hosted by your Pilates class. He ran out of throwing stars so he cut the sleeves off his bathrobe to go resupply at the mall. He looks like the assistant coach of the NYPD. He was the winner of a costume contest attended solely by January 6th rioters. Anyway, he shows up at his partner’s murder scene wearing a sleeveless shirt and a beret and nobody says a word. Not even Jerry Orbach.

Seagal tries to cry in this scene. He digs deep and expresses the agony of a man whose meatball sandwich is too wet to hold.

It’s a true test of his ability as an actor, because in reality no sandwich is too wet for the Aikido master. Gino goes to visit some mafiosos in an embarrassing scene reminiscent of a group of high school students reenacting The Sopranos for a senior project. His Brooklyn accent shifts between Sleepy Steven Seagal and an open mic comic doing a gangster impression, frequently in the same sentence. As he drives away from the meeting, furiously on the hunt for Richie, a random maniac tosses a sack full of puppy into the street.

We are 16 minutes into the film and already Gino has rescued a woman and a puppy. The city, it’s just so full of CRIME! (See “Steven Seagal is insecure,” above.) Immediately after nearly running over the puppy he buys a six pack of seltzer from a kid sitting on the corner. He stops and talks to the kid about his (the kid’s) mother, because Gino is both a man of the people and a hero of the neighborhood. He’s going to cartoonishly break this child’s neck in three years.

Gino drives around until he spots Richie, who freaks out and orders his men to scatter. Richie is in the middle of a murderous bender and has several gangsters with him, so you would be forgiven for wondering why they don’t simply blow Gino away. But this is Steven Seagal’s Out for Justice, which means the bad guys are required to behave as though they’re being pursued by a tomb curse, rather than force the self-described Aikido legend with the muscle definition of a Stretch Armstrong to perform an action sequence. So instead of a thrilling display of Seagal’s (alleged) martial arts skills, we get a brief car chase during which Gino slides a Chevy Caprice through pedestrian traffic like a horse he can’t decide whether to impregnate or shoot. At one point an elderly couple turns their heads to wonder where he’s going in kind of a hurry.

A few scenes later, Gino strolls into a crooked butcher shop to squeeze them for information about Richie. 1-900-HOTDOG has already devoted many words and countless ounces of chi to describing Steven Seagal’s unique way of moving, so I think it’s worth evaluating his gait clinically and objectively, like we’re grading him for a dog show. When Seagal walks, it is the motion of a man challenging himself to keep his neck completely still while swinging his arms using only his shoulders. It’s truly remarkable.

Just for fun, here’s a collection of thrilling walks from throughout the film:

The butcher shop fight is an excellent showcase of Seagal’s Aikido mastery, which, were we to distill it down to a single phrase, would probably be “shoving people.” Gino is instantly attacked with a meat cleaver and, in an electrifying display of skill, slap-shoves the assailant’s cleaver into his own leg. A second hoodlum attacks Gino by running at him and yelling.

Most of Aikido is designed around countering this specific technique, so the hoodlum was doomed from the moment he picked up the proverbial sword, but not the literal sword because that would’ve taken time and money better spent on assembling Seagal’s wardrobe accessories. Gino deftly steps out of the way and shoves him into a deli counter. Then, for the coup de grace, Gino shoves the guy again, in the opposite direction. The hoodlum trips and falls onto the floor, utterly defeated. The rest of the deli’s employees spring into action with wild haymakers. Gino easily deflects these blows and slaps one man into submission before cleaving his useless haymaker-throwing hand to the wall.

This is the thrust of any Steven Seagal fight scene – he skips all the impressive technique and choreography to get right to the maiming. He fast-forwards every action scene he watches to the tablesaw faceplant or the uppercut into the piranha enclosure. Seagal doesn’t actually like fighting, or fight scenes, or martial arts, or choreography – he just likes violence. Which is ironic considering his late-stage identity as a Buddhist Llama, an honor he bribed and bullied his way into receiving. This is all laid out in detail in the sourcebook Future Seagal: The Glimmer Man and Beyond. His idea of choreography is doing a Samurai Showdown win animation to strike you in the balls after pinning you to the wall with culinary equipment. Two more assailants appear, and Gino gets into his fighting stance, which looks like he is taking a shit in a haunted house.

He shoves these two jokers to death, wearing the facial expression of a man trying desperately to hold a pose until the director says “cut.” A butcher in a Mets cap comes rushing out to defend his coworkers, and Gino executes him with a bat to the back of the skull. Because we forgot to spend any money on choreography, the guy in the Mets cap just stands there motionlessly and waits for his brain to get whacked out of his nose.

Gino grabs a final thug in the same awkward arm lock you’d use to steal lunch money and beats him with a sausage.

Finally, he steals the shop owner’s gun with a teleporting wristlock, which as you know is a bulletproof maneuver so it would’ve been useless to try and shoot Seagal at that moment anyway.

He takes the gun apart and tosses it aside with disgust, although he will personally use guns to disfigure and execute several people later on in the film. Gino’s quest for justice eventually brings him to a gangster bar where he is nearly forced to do actual karate. Thinking quickly, he falls back on the reliable technique of shoving spring-loaded henchmen as they lunge at him one at a time, bonking each of them with a towel. The towel is wrapped around a billiard ball, so this is a Power Bonk. It is during the Power Bonk that Seagal’s foot actually leaves the ground for the first time, to deliver a reverse spinning heel stomp. It’s as impressive as watching somebody catch their earbud by accident.

The Power Bonk is the stuff of skull-crushing legend. (For a better example, watch the billiard ball sequence in The Night Comes For Us.) But here it is a sad ghost of its former self, like it got stuck haunting a pizza oven because Sbarro’s paved over the 18th century courthouse where it was executed. Even while wielding a cruelly makeshift nunchaku, like Michelangelo reneging on a bet, Seagal miserably drains the excitement from every fight scene like a colander that has literally never been washed. After the Power Bonk, Gino gets into a stick fight with a man named Sticks, because what Seagal thinks is cool and the contents of a Double Dragon comic book are exactly the same. Now, I know what you’re thinking – Double Dragon, stick fights, and Double Dragon stick fights are all totally bitchin’, and I agree with you. The problem occurs when you inject Steven Seagal like a tube of expired cake frosting. The high-octane sequence cuts between Seagal flailing his sticks wildly like a man tanking his Benihana interview and a profile shot of the two combatants putting on a Highlander: The Series stunt show for everyone at the family reunion who isn’t drunk yet.

Gino gets tired of spinning his sticks almost instantly and wristlocks his opponent to death. Then he plants his feet and the rest of the bar runs at him to receive their wristlocks.

One guy does a kick, and this display of foot mobility is so enraging that Gino uppercuts the man’s nutsack into his skull and breaks his leg with a triangle rack.

The movie is almost anti-martial arts. It punishes this henchman with a dickercut for trying to do something interesting, as though Seagal is arguing all that fairy kicking ain’t nothing compared to a couple of slaps and a shot to the nuts. Incidentally, the bar scene begins and ends with Seagal shoving an unprepared noncombatant (see “Seagal is an insecure bully,” throughout).

In the universe of Out for Justice, we are asked to believe that Gina Gershon is William Forsythe’s sister, Patti. We accept this because it is far from the most outlandish claim the film makes. Gino goes to Patti’s nightclub to harass her, and harass her he does! He drags her into her office, repeatedly calls her a whore like he’s trying to use the word as many times as he can in a minute to win a substantial cash prize, and completely destroys the room to terrify her into telling him what he wants to know.

It is easily the most chilling sequence in any Steven Seagal film, including the ones that are supposed to be scary. He also shoves a bouncer over a railing and down a staircase before he drags Patti to jail for no reason.

Gino falsely charges her with prostitution and throws her into lockup while he and the rest of the police station take turns calling her “a $10 whore.” Remember, Seagal thinks this behavior makes him look cool. Anyway, we never see Patti again. Gino leaves the police station to visit his estranged wife and son, bringing the puppy he rescued earlier. At one point during the drive, he promises the puppy that he will make sure it has sex with another puppy before the night is through. Note that he even pets the dog like a creep. He yanks the dog into his lap like he’s wrestling with a hoagie. In the manner in which a creep might pet a dog while driving alone at night.

He arrives at his wife’s apartment, where she invites him inside for espresso. Seagal’s New York voice must be contagious, because the way Gino’s wife says “espresso” sounds like someone trying to get thrown out of a formal event by overindulging their pronunciation of “Guy Fieri.” They kiss. It’s hideous. Even Seagal wants another take, and not just for pervert reasons.

Mobsters attack the apartment, and if you think Gino doesn’t kill all of these dudes instantly with Shove Karate™, you’ve got another thing coming. A shove, most likely. One thug tries to blast him with a shotgun, but Gino expertly slaps the barrel aside so that it nearly kills his wife and son instead.

He then shoves a defenseless man out of the window to his death. If you’re keeping track, we are now four fight scenes down (five if you count him assaulting Patti), and Seagal has briefly lifted one foot, once. I want to be this good at karate.

Gino finally learns that Richie is hiding out in Juliana Margulies’ apartment thanks to a tip phoned in by the seltzer kid from earlier. He arrives on the scene to dismantle the rest of Richie’s thugs, including completely severing one dude’s leg with a shotgun blast, which rules, but is still not technically a martial art.

We never check back in on that guy, although we can hear him shouting in pained outrage for most of the finale. That’s not a joke. I kept thinking someone was caught in a trap outside my window. It is during the final showdown, right around the 80-minute mark of this martial arts action film, that Seagal throws his first true kick. He ponderously lifts his foot thirty full inches off the ground to stomp a goon’s balls so hard that the goon flies against a brick wall and dies instantly.

Finally, blessedly, mercifully, it is time for the ultimate battle between Steven Seagal and William Forsythe. In a real fight I would give Forsythe the edge, because he looks like the type of person who has bled at a restaurant while a frustrated woman yells at him. If he were issuing Pit Fighter challenges, I would avoid his gaze. Conversely, Steven Seagal is a man pretending to know karate professionally. But this is Out for Justice, which means Gino is an invincible badass even though he appears to be less mobile than a discontinued appliance. He defeats Richie by watching him flip around the room while skillfully stepping out of the way. “Aikido” might literally mean “just shove them.”

Gino winds up pummeling Richie with an entire kitchen, like the pilot episode of a cooking show Steven Seagal pitched to a cornered female executive. He’s putting together a recipe for a night out… a night Out for Justice! First he seasons Richie with a pepper shaker:

Then he whomps Richie with a frying pan:

He uses a deadly lighting-fist combination to tenderize Richie a little more, I bet he goes for some breadcrumbs next:

Finally he kills Richie with a corkscrew to the eye, so I guess we may be staying In for Justice after all.

During the film’s epilogue, Gino takes his wife for a stroll on the boardwalk with their new puppy. He spots the dog maniac from earlier and delivers his final kick of the film, directly into the maniac’s dog-hating balls. The puppy pees on the maniac’s head, then joins Gino as he shambles into the sunset with his wife. His son was not invited, though is presumably still alive.

The end credits roll over a montage of unused footage from the film. Not outtakes, mind you – extended versions of scenes we already saw. Seagal wanted to do the Jackie Chan thing, but doesn’t understand what the Jackie Chan thing is, or why Jackie Chan does it.

Finally the montage freezes on Seagal’s face, looking offscreen with a steely-eyed gaze that says, “There’s an extra wet meatball sub over there, and it’s about to get fucked. By me.”

Somehow, Out for Justice managed to achieve modest box office success despite being an embarrassing monument to the ego of a notorious bullfrog turd. That said, it was the beginning of the end for Seagal as a major star, even though his biggest hit, Under Siege, was yet to come. Out for Justice didn’t perform as well as his previous film Marked for Death, and three different Warner Bros. employees filed sexual harassment complaints against him during its production. (This is in addition to the alleged abusive treatment of the film’s stunt performers I mentioned earlier.) Furthermore, his notorious appearance on Saturday Night Live, in which he treated the cast so horribly that Lorne Michaels banned him from ever returning, was in promotion of this film. So in retrospect, Out for Justice is the perfect showcase for Steven Seagal – a terrible actor who does boring action sequences and mistreats everyone around him to the tune of diminishing box office returns. Here he is eating a carrot with the dictator of Belarus (see “Steven Seagal is presidential,” throughout).

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is trying to wage a one-man war against crime without bending his elbows. Check out their Supernatural watchalong Him-Boos, and their improv mockumentary BADICAL, about the raddest fighting game (n)ever made.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Leesa, who had a pet seagull named steven a long time ago. It, too, claimed to be an aikido master and choked to death on seven corn dogs.