Movie Review: Today You Die

Today You Die

Produced by Steven Seagal


This guy, I don’t know. He always plays a good guy in these self-produced movies, but he kills lots of innocent people along the way, all with a good-guy-smile on his face.

In this example of the genre he starts out burglarizing the apartment of a “drug dealer,” ingeniously of course, but he is discovered and has to fight his way out. The result? Three or four dead, including the “drug dealer,” and another handful stomped to shit. Steven, or “Harlan” in this instance, gets away clean with a huge pile of money and several kilograms of precious-jem-jewelry. Which, of course, he plans on giving to charity, after overhead, he has a wonderful lifestyle to maintain. This could be any number of things, and Felony-Murder in the first degree is one of them.

The Felony-Murder spree continues, in fact it accelerates. Steven signs on as a driver on a “legitimate deal,” although how a famous gangster could legitimately hire him to drive an armored Brinks style truck for a “money pick up” with an associate dressed up as a money carrier guard is not clear to anyone in the movie. It’s pretty clear to the rest of us.

Legitimate deal my ass, the associate shoots and kills two of the “Brinks” guys. Two more Felony-Murders, ignorance is no defense on that one, not ever supreme ignorance. Steven then drives the van in an escape attempt, and in the process numerous police cars are spectacularly wrecked, we later find out that three officers died in the flaming crashes. Three more Felony-Murders, or even worse, all of this is in the course of dangerous felonies that Steven is guilty of. We’re up to about seven by now, all within about the first half hour of the movie.

Steven is arrested, and he goes to prison, all in the blink of an eye as is customary in these movies. He is justifiably sentenced to life without parole. In prison several more people get killed or maimed, but all of them are bad, not like the poor security guards or cops who are already dead.

Steven escapes with a new friend, who is the same strange combination of good guy and homicidal maniac. In the course of the ensuing pursuit of justice about twenty-five people are killed. Almost all of them are bad, and all races are represented, so it does not overly concern us.

By the end of the movie, Steven and his new jail-bird friend have recovered twenty million dollars of dirty money, kept some of it, and given the rest to a children’s hospital. The last scene is Steven and his girl friend schmoozing with the sympathetic woman DEA agent at the hospital surrounded by cute orphans. Fade to black.