BENNETT INVENTORY : That Moment

On Deadly Ground -- Playing w/ Cupcake

Post-holiday Winter viewing is always a struggle to reckon; grim, weather-appropriate Dramas in celebration of nothing. Sure there are plenty of fun "snow movies," but you've got to be in the mood for fun. So, when I am, despite the grayness of existence, 1994's On Deadly Ground is just about at the top of that very specific list. 

Before I became so methodical and unyielding, it was simply a "sleepover movie": a film watched ritualistically whenever you slept over someone's house when you were a kid. I think that's key because it's best enjoyed with at least one other person - if not a group - and a big reason for that is that it's mercilessly quotable from beginning to end -- but very much one scene in particular. 

Steven Seagal movies (between 1988 and 1998) typically guaranteed you one specific scene. Barring some of the bigger budget plots that pitted him against soldiers/terrorists/mercenaries, at some point in the movie he would go up against some hired goons or local hicks - always in a group, and often in a barroom setting. On Deadly Ground (also directed by Seagal) has him playing an environmentally conscious firefighter named Forrest Taft who embarks on his own brand of highly-trained street justice against an evil oil company in the Alaskan wilderness, while simultaneously preserving the rights of the Natives. If you're wondering why I bothered telling you all of that, it's because each and every one of these plot points comes into play in a scene roughly 10 minutes into the feature. In a bar. 

A gang of off-duty oil workers begin bullying one of the locals - mostly with clumsy and obvious racial slurs. Soon they become physically violent, and only then does Forrest intervene. It's this scene that appears in most of his films that is typically the best scene, but this one rises to a kinda joyous absurdity that a few of the others don't have. Firstly, this bar of brawlers and onlookers seemed to be recorded mostly with ADR; on top of the Country Music soundtrack and fight foley of breaking glass and bones cracking like uncooked spaghetti, isolated bits of dialogue dominate the audio, like "Don't hurt him, Forrest!" or when Seagal grabs an assailant by his genitals which cues a disembodied voice to exclaim, "My nuts!!" I can never help but imagine people in the sound booth recording these lines. 

Once he takes down a dozen or so of these underlings, he's left with the lead antagonist of this scene, played by the marvelous Mike Starr - best known for Uncle Buck, Ed Wood, and Dumb & Dumber (which are the first three that come to mind - I could've easily said The Natural, GoodFellas, and Miller's Crossing and it still would've sold his talents). Forrest challenges him to "the hand slap game" which was (is?) an aggressively violent middle school game that involves, predictably, the slapping of hands. Forrest's version of the game allows him to beat Mr. Big Balls to a bloody mess with a few swift blows to the face & abdomen. And once the bully is broken and beaten, Forrest calmly asks, "What does it take? ...What does it take to change the essence of a man?" And then Mike Starr, as the character and as an actor, humbles himself before this beastly blowhard and tearfully laments, "I need time...to change..." Pure Cinematic Magic.

- Paul