ABOVE THE LAW - Blu-ray review

Did you ever wonder where all those action stars came from? I mean, action heroes have been punching out villains since the beginning of motion pictures ("The Great Train Robbery," 1903) through countless serials and Westerns to the advent of the martial-arts age with Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris. But it was really the 1980s that saw the heyday of the action star, with Big Arnold, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan leading the way. For Steven Seagal, the beginning was 1988 with "Above the Law," his film debut with a movie he not only starred in but co-wrote and co-produced. It was a start, and it still pretty much defines the genre, for better or for worse, mostly the latter.

In "Above the Law" Seagal plays Chicago cop Nico Toscani. When I was a kid my father dearly loved smoking Toscani cigars, but my mother wouldn't let him in the house when he did. Toscanis are dry, twisted, smelly little cheroots, something like the movie under review. Watching the film may be a guilty pleasure for fans of crime thrillers, and it certainly put Seagal on the map, but I'm guessing most other viewers have moved beyond the mere sight of shooting, fighting, and killing for their amusement.

So Seagal plays a cop, one trained, though, by the CIA in the jungles of Laos and Vietnam before he quit in disgust over their interrogation methods (talk about timely). Now he's in Chicago, and he still can't escape his past. The chief baddie in a new evil scheme is one of the dastardly guys from his old CIA days, Dr. Kurt Zagon. How do we know Zagon is a villain? His name starts with a Z, and he's played by Henry Silva. Hollywood early on typecast Silva as a heavy, probably because of his slight resemblance to Jack Palance; I dunno. In any case, he's a fine actor, and it's shame he's had to play so many bad guys. You'll recognize him when you see him.

Toscani is one of Seagal's soft-spoken, ultra-polite, seemingly mild-mannered characters, the same type of character, in fact, that he would continue to play in most of his movies. Yet whenever Toscani sees an injustice, which is on every street corner of every city he's in, he chooses to solve it with his fists or his gun. This happens about every thirty seconds in "Above the Law." It seems that practically everybody in Chicago is either a cop or a hoodlum. Toscani walks into a nondescript, working-class corner bar, and every patron in the place is a thug out to kill him. Naturally, he has to do what he has to do: knock the crude out of all of them.

There is a plot to the movie, but it doesn't amount to much and takes a backseat to the punching, kicking, and shooting. Toscani arranges a drug bust, but when he brings in the offenders, the FBI step in and make the police release suspects. Then Toscani learns that the CIA are directing the FBI who are directing the police. It's a hierarchy that Toscani follows to the top, uncovering a dire conspiracy in the process. Where would action movies be without conspiracies.

The usual things take place in the movie. Toscani's wife (played by Sharon Stone in an early role for her, and one in which she gets to utter maybe two words) doesn't understand him. Toscani's partner (Pam Grier) is a beautiful woman about to retire from the force and become an attorney, and she doesn't understand him, either. Toscani's fellow officers love and respect him and will follow him anywhere.

But Toscani prefers to work alone and break all the rules. Supposedly, the title derives from Richard Nixon's remark that "no one is above the law," meant to be ironic in the context of the movie and refer not only to Nixon but to the CIA and FBI taking the law into their own hands. Yet it is Toscani who thinks he can do anything he wants: never working on any particular case but following his own instincts, beating up witnesses, shooting first and asking questions later. Of course, the Captain makes him turn in his gun and badge at one point. It wouldn't be Dirty Harry, er, Nico Toscani without that happening. And note to villains: Don't just shoot him.

Andrew Davis directed the film from a script tweaked by Seagal himself. I guess the studio liked the actor so much, they gave him the latitude to do pretty much whatever he wanted in his first film. I guess, too, they were right in doing so. Seagal went on to stardom.

"Above the Law" features a good deal of chasing, punching, shooting, and exploding. It also features a good deal of hair. Remember, this was still the eighties. Hair was big. Very big. Seagal didn't have a ponytail yet, but it was getting there. And he could still tuck in his shirt.

Video:
It's safe to say that this is one of WB's Blu-ray lite editions. They cram the film onto a single-layer BD25 with hardly an extra in sight. One can only surmise the studio figured this was a popular enough title that it would sell on its own, without much help from a pristine print or additional bonus items. The upshot is, you've got to be a serious fan of Steven Seagal or the film itself to find this BD worthwhile.

The VC-1 encode captures the film's original aspect ratio, 1.85:1 (or most of it, as WB usually make sure their transfers fill a 1.78:1 widescreen television), and it probably does as good a job as one could expect reproducing the film's original image quality. The problem is that the image varies from fairly good to less than desirable. Most often, the video is soft and subdued; sometimes it's gritty and fuzzy; and occasionally it looks downright veiled. Facial tones vary from pale white to deep purple, and the picture itself seems to go in and out of focus. I doubt that anyone will be using the disc as a reference standard.

Audio:
As usual, Warner Bros. offer two audio choices in English: regular, lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and advanced, lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1. Frankly, though, there isn't a lot to choose between them. Although the TrueHD is slightly clearer and warmer than the Dolby Digital, there is surprisingly little in the way of frequency range, surround activity, or dynamics for the soundtrack to convey. Mainly, one hears an annoyingly jazzy background score, a little dialogue, and the sounds of gunshots and fists on flesh. Not even the explosions have much impact.

Extras:
There's a widescreen theatrical trailer in standard definition. That's it. My kind of disc. There are also thirty-one scene selections; English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian spoken languages; French, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

Parting Shots:
You'll have to look long and hard to find any trace of wit, humor, style, or charm in "Above the Law." It's filled with old-fashioned, nonstop violence from beginning to end, with subtlety out the window. Today's audiences may find the movie more of a museum piece than a satisfying action flick, a document much like "The Great Train Robbery" certifying the beginning of an era, in this case Steven Seagal's starting point in pictures.