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Sascha Petrosevitz (Steven Seagal) an FBI undercover agent gets thrown into the notorious
prison Alcatraz, newly reopened by the California Penal Authority. He meets up with a partner Nick Frazier (Ja Rule) also serving his sentence. While prison authorities
prepare for the execution of an old convict, a commando team of renegades in cahoots with Donny (Morris Chestnut), a prison official turned criminal mastermind, infiltrate the
high tech fortress. Their purpose is to get hold of the convict about to be executed in order to force him to tell them the whereabouts of $200 million worth of gold bars he
has stolen and stashed away. The renegades also take as hostage a female justice of the Supreme Court who is on hand to witness the execution. Sascha and Nick team up as they
arm and lead the other convicts to prevent the infiltrators from killing the lady Justice.
These days, there is a proliferation of action films and action stars and they must vie with each other
through special effects, death defying action and other sensational derring-does to retain the interest of their fans. Steven Seagal's films are no exception and this present
one tries to outdo his earlier pictures. There is a continuous series of firefights, martial arts confrontations, explosions and shoulder-launched rockets shoot-outs. So
focused is the film on action that at times, characters engage in it for no discernible reason. Some of the stunts are astounding and the special effects effective. There is
hardly any dialogue or characterization, nothing to delineate Sascha Petrosevitz (Seagal) not even by the slightest Russian accent. The plot has loose ends but most do not
seem to care about that in an action movie. Seagal has not lost his touch as an action superstar. Nia Peeples, the good-looking Filipino female Hollywood star is an impressive
fighting machine as she exhibits her gun-popping, knife- wielding and martial arts skills.
The whole film is a spectacle of violence. One can come out of the theater groggy, lightheaded and perhaps
emotionally drained. Repeated and frequent exposure to this kind of movie can be deadening; deadening that is, to our humanity, to our sense of sympathy, concern and
compassion for victims of violence and other sufferers. The effect is not sudden nor immediate but it can be observed when people, callous to the sight of blood and violence,
are indifferent to, or no longer seem affected or touched by the loss of lives or by the tragedies that befall others in real life, for these "incidents" seem to have become
commonplace to them. The culture of violence that we decry has been cultivated with our willing consent and cooperation first in the theater. For a film can indeed effectively
and negatively influence. And we can also mention the possible effect of computer games on very young children who get a steady diet of violence for hours and hours in the
guise of entertainment. How do we protect them from being desensitized? Perhaps, we can ask ourselves sometimes how we can help discourage violence in our real world.
(Date reviewed: January 17, 2003)
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