Sensei Seagal once again plays the same character as we've seen the past 35 years. Same character, same voice, same Ole constipated look we all have come to know and expect from him. I dont understand why he even makes movies anymore cause they are just absolute Turds. This was so bad I lasted 50 minutes and choke slammed the movie... Please Sensei no more of these movies. Its just embarrassing at this point and it just needs to stop. Do a sit com or maybe some local TV commercials to pay the bills but the days of great action movies are long gone. I bet a local furniture store would hire you as their spokesman so give that a try instead of making another one of these movies... Ug sorry Sensei but just have to keep it real.

In his early films, Steven Seagal was a very bankable leading man. His films weren't deep but they were very exciting and his close combat fighting skills were exciting to watch. Flash forward a few decades and Seagal is still making films...but times have changed. He no longer is a big star, nearly all of his movies go straight to video and he is 67 years-old and looks like a combination of a Bond villain as well as Dracula. The overall scores of these movies also have dropped significantly...with mostly negative reviews. Just for kicks, I decided to try one of his most recent films, "General Commander"...and, sadly, it offered pretty much what I expected.

The first thing I noticed about this film is that I didn't recognize anyone aside from Seagal. In his early films, he was provided with many wonderful familiar supporting actors. Here, they look like mostly new small-time actors...and a few of them (such as the CIA boss) were pretty terrible. In this sense, this later Seagal film is a huge disappointment. I am not sure if these folks were hired because the limited budget simply couldn't afford better actors. It is possible they were hired to make Seagal look better by comparison. All I know is that the scenes without Seagal (and there were MANY) were the worst in the film.

The story begins by learning that Jake (Seagal) has quit the CIA two weeks ago and the film then does a flashback to that time and you learn that he and his team were resigned after a somewhat botched operation. The team tried hard and stopped the baddies (even shooting at one of the baddies' vans and making it instantly explode...something that happens later in the film as well!). But because this project didn't result in the apprehension of some guy named Orsetti, their boss (the bad actress) reassigns them to other projects and breaks up the team. This really didn't make a lot of sense...but then, without this, you wouldn't have Jake and the team go Rogue and deliver butt-kicking justice without the sanction of the CIA....something he does, apparently, in slow motion thanks to Seagal's advancing age and waistline. And why is Orsetti that important? Well, among his many crimes are his procuring organs...from live and unsuspecting donors!

When I was a professional film reviewer, I saw a lot of cheap independent productions--such was the nature of the job. In most ways, "General Commander" looks like one of these EXCEPT for the nice location shooting in the Philippines. Otherwise, it just seemed amateurish and Seagal plays what seems like a parody of his formerly charismatic self. Only for the most die-hard of his fans...who might just be disappointed since Seagal really isn't the lone wolf but part of a team.

Seagal seems to be struggling for funding these days, so maybe his days of filmmaking are nearing an end. Judging by the quality of them, we can only hope. This has the same quality as his East European stuff, and Hungary is one of the countries credited in its production, along with finance from the UK and USA. It was actually shot in the Philippines with an international cast. Seagal does his old TICKER trick, staying in a chair for most of the time and only getting out of it for a couple of heavily doubled fight scenes. The rest is a monotonous mish-mash of genre tropes with criminal gangs, kidnappings and shoot-outs the order of the day. I hated it.