Attrition

The sprinkling of fights can’t help remedy the nonsensical spiritual and philosophical blabber.

aka Final Mission

Directed by Mathieu Weschler

Starring: Steven Seagal, Louis Fan Siu Wong, Yu Kang, Ting Sue

USA, English and Mandarin

2018

These days watching any product of Steven Seagal feels disgusting considering his real life persona out to the public it’s hard to buy into a character that he is portraying as which is supposedly the epitome of goodness, matters made worse considering he is not even trying in the acting department.

Axe (Steven Seagal) is a former special forces who has opted to retire from the force after witnessing the death of a hostage. Axe now secludes himself at a South eastern village as a doctor to the poor villagers but Axe is haunted by dreams of a topless floating woman who divulges that they will meet someday. The woman in Axes dream happens to be Tara (Ting Sue) a mystical woman who can read minds and cure people. Tara attracts the attention of crime boss Qmom (Yu Kang) who has a disease that prevents him from exposure to sunlight and wishes for his ailment to be cured so he orders the capture of Tara. Tara’s father begs Axe for his aid in securing his daughter and Axe obliges, calling his old team of special forces to help. There’s also something about Axe’s kung fu brethren Chen Man (Louis Fan Siu Wong) who is jealous of Axe because there sifu favours Axe.

Attrition marks French director Mathieu Weschler’s second feature film after the low budget film The Borderlands (aka Covert Operations) (2014), Weschler and cinematographer Vincent Vieillard-Baron makes a good collaborative duo as was evident in their previous collaboration in The Borderlands. They take the low budget setting and instill some nice camera movements and lighting, with great use of shadows. There is some nice tracking shots especially the scene at a bar where we follow Louis Fan’s character and the camera circulates around the set and back onto our character. With another scene playing out in reverse, from a meat grinder reversing out into a hand then the hand reconnected with the body then to the death of said person. Sadly the attempts at artistic filming feels at odds with the generic story and atrocious acting.

Steven Seagal plays pretty much the same character he has been playing all these years, the wise spiritual bad ass, a character that he really believes to be. And watching him spew the constant spiritual babble about the goodness, karma, protecting the weak etc. it’s a hard pill to swallow. Though credit has to be given to Segal because he looks like he buys into all the malarkey that he is selling. Also note he wrote the script. Poor old Louis Fan seems lost in the proceedings and fails to perform opposite Seagal in there scenes together, his inability to properly speak English hurts matters gravely. Fan will flip between sentences of English and then long spews of Mandarin and Seagal will reply with English but at the end it feels like shots spliced together and not actual scenes where they were actually sharing dialogue. Even in his native tongue Fan’s performance is less than stellar. Kudos to Ting Sue for attempting to speak Mandarin but her annunciation is completely off resulting in a very stilted performance. The same goes for Cha-Lee Yoon as well who for most parts speak English but when forced to speak Mandarin he feels like he is reciting lines opposed to natural performing. Yu Kang who you may know as one of Donnie Yen’s main action choreographers gives the strongest performance clearly relishing another evil turn as the villain and his demeanor and look is fitting. For some reason Fan Mui Sang comes out of retirement in a guest appearance in this horrific film as the sifu of Axe and Chen Man but he is not offered much but a very badly staged plot reveal. Bit players are all laughably bad and are poorly dubbed in Mandarin as their lips move the dialogue don’t quite fit there lip movement.

During the 50 minutes mark the actual story kicks in and audiences are introduced to a host of new random characters who are part of Axe’s crack team, they all are given their own intro cards with names such as; Scarecrow, Hollywood, Infidel and Yin Ying slapped across the screen but this is a very misplaced for such technique was never established before. These characters have no backgrounds or characterization and are bought in pretty late into the film so they feel hollow. It makes it all the much worse when you watch their ultimate strategy to infiltrate the enemy base is such a generic plan and none of the team members really contributing any real expertise. character.

Action is choreographed by Can Aydin (Red Sparrow (2018), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017)) and there are some minor flourishes of creativity at times drawing inspiration from the Ip Man films. With a bout between Louis Fan and Steven Seagal using the butterfly swords and the long pole then shifting into sticky hands technique. There is nothing that particularly stands out about the fight but is reasonably put together with some nice framing. Further in the film there is a part where its clearly trying to rip off Tony Leung’s The Grandmaster with Seagal donning a white hat surrounded by heavy rain pour, he is challenged by Ocean Hou in a very unnecessary scuffle. Probably the biggest highlight of the film is seeing Louis Fan take on the multiple thugs during the finale, Fan shows amazing grace and agility, executing his kicks and kung fu flawlessly, this in turn is aided by some nice camera framing and editing. Steven Seagal has a throw down with Yu Kang that does not feature anything spectacular in terms of choreography but there is a certain elegance to Seagal’s hand techniques but sadly its Yu Kang that fails to demonstrate anything great in terms of fighting prowess. Steven Seagal does adopted the chain punching technique made famous by Donnie Yen made in the Ip Man series.

There are strong levels of violence prevalent throughout the film with limbs and body parts severed and mild levels of nudism. The nudism can be a little random with the aforementioned dream sequence of a topless floating figure in Seagal’s dream. Making matters worse is the real life situation that surrounds Seagal and his nature making what could have been an innocent scene come off as sleazy.

Sadly the whole film feels like a vanity project and its apparent that it is Seagal trying to pedal his philosophical and saintly self, made the more apparent is the overlong spiritual babble at the end that does not relate to the film or the end credits which is of Seagal’s stage performance which by the way is probably his best performance in the whole film.