The Movies That Moved Me: John Flynn’s OUT FOR JUSTICE
I think a lot about what constitutes a film favorite. Admittedly, that includes any number of Steven Seagal films that I’ve seen pre-Half Past Dead. Mind you, I haven’t consumed a lot of his movies in the last twenty years and mainly because so many of them fall short of what was so incumbent for my tastes as a martial arts fanboy coming into the new millenium.
Indeed though, the first decade or so of Seagal-fandom can be easily outlined by a handy list of titles I can point to as watchable guilty pleasures. After lots of consideration though, I have to give it to the late John Flynn’s Out For Justice, in which Seagal’s character, a NYPD cop named Gino, hunts down a raging crack addict who goes on a killing spree in Brooklyn after murdering Gino’s partner.
It’s been a minute since I’ve seen the 1991 Warner Bros. release, but it’s a film that’s certainly stayed with me. It’s the most cheesy, hamfisted, Brooklyny 90s cop movie I’ve ever seen, and with some of the most bluster you’ll ever see from a script with characters as loudly New York as they could be, particularly for a film that was partially shot in Los Angeles.
It’s quite comical, and topping it all off is Seagal laying waste with his usual brand of aikido coupled with brawler fisticuffs and gunplay. The film’s Wikipedia page also has some of the wildest tidbits you might ever learn about this film and what happened behind the scenes. To that, I’m kind of curious as to what an extended cut of this film looks like, and accordingly, just how much more menacing and monumental co-star William Forsythe was in the role of antagonist, Richie.
There’s a running joke I share with friend and filmmaker Michael Hoad about this movie as well, and it all permeates around the film’s centerpiece action scene in which Gino bogards a billard and bar room full of goombahs and goons while investigating Richie’s whereabouts in connection to his partner’s murder. It also includes martial arts legend Dan Insoanto whose character goes by the name “Sticks” because in a script with a perfunctory revenge plot that cues up plenty of workable R-rated violence and doesn’t need that much depth, why the fuck not?
