Kill Switch is one of the very few Steven Seagal films in which the
screenwriter weighs as much as the star. In fact, they are precisely the same
weight, because Seagal assumed the double role in this police procedural
set among the Memphis lowlife..
Seagal plays a homicide detective who specializes in deranged
serial killers, and in this storyline he's tracking two of them
simultaneously. One is a pseudo-Zodiac killer who "channels spirits good
and bad" and leaves behind encrypted clues with some kind of astrological
significance. The other is a bad-ass hillbilly who just enjoys killing and
torturing people. Because Seagal is a genius at finding and apprehending
serial killers, the FBI wants to study his methods, so they assign a
Federal
shadow, a callow woman in her twenties. Because the
Zodiac clone is particularly demented, he tries to frame Seagal himself
for the killings, using an ingenious scheme to obtain Seagal's DNA and
place it under the fingertips of victims. Seagal knows that he's not the
killer, of course, but the FBI agent is not so sure.
This movie is not a worthwhile police procedural, but it could have been
with just a little tweaking. The biggest problem with it is that it is
very short on both plot and character development, and very heavy on fight
scenes, chases, and shoot-outs. That general problem is compounded by two
more specific elements: (1) some of the fight scenes involve minor characters or even
extras who are irrelevant to the plot; (2) they are not very good fight
scenes because the director employed a lot of stunt doubling (Seagal's
looks nothing like him), embellished
the pace with jumpy editing, and shot too many head-and-shoulder shots.
The first twenty minutes of this film are very difficult to sit through,
since they involve fight scenes between Seagal's body double and various
characters unrelated to the plot.
That's the film's major flaw. If it had been resolved by spending more
time with the major characters and making the Zodiac plot more interesting
and mysterious, the film could have been a good straight-to-vid. The first
twenty minutes are awful, but after that the film has a
bit of down-and-dirty Memphis atmosphere, an appropriate blues score, and
a passable basic plot structure. Seagal even attempts a bit of uncharacteristically ambitious acting by
mumbling with a Memphis accent instead of his normal generic midwestern
American.
There are, however, some other issues to pick over.
First, the "Seagal as suspect" angle is a completely undeveloped
throwaway that gets resolved with a convenient confession. The film could
have been far better if this idea had either been dropped altogether or
introduced earlier and left as a legitimate possibility. The way it is
handled in the existing film, it's introduced late in the film, resolved
almost immediately and too conveniently, and was never a legitimate
possibility from the viewer's perspective, so it seems like just a
completely off-the-wall theory proposed by the naive FBI agent. This turns
the agent herself into an official cop-film cliché: the excessively
academic fed who has a lot to learn about the real world from the hardened
homicide detective.
Second, the editing is annoying. Several scenes involve the quirky,
pseudo-hip new technique of showing the same few seconds over and over
again from slightly different angles.
Third, the film's final scene is a totally irrelevant and utterly
confusing post-script. It shows Seagal arriving in a country home,
bringing presents to a Russian-speaking woman and her two sons, then
following the sexy woman into the bedroom where she disrobes. Seagal and
the blonde close the bedroom door, and the credits roll! Don't get me
wrong. I'm all in favor of adding gratuitous female nudity. This scene,
however, seems to be leftover footage from a completely different Seagal
movie. These characters have never been introduced at all. We don't know
why they are speaking Russian, or why Seagal speaks Russian to them,
although the boys call him "papa." We don't know if this takes place three
days or fifteen years after the main plot.
