Black Dawn (2005)

Good idea lost in the noise

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Arms dealers. Young Russian terrorists. Crooked CIA Black Ops. Special Agent Jonathan Cold(Steven Seagal)has his hands full. It's all about Plutonium, enough to make nuclear weapons and Cold will have to contend with lots of opposition coming out of the woodwork. CIA agent Amanda Stuart(Tamara Davies), who was trained by Cold, will assist him in trying to stop the terrorists(and whoever else)from getting their hands on the Plutonium. James Donovon(John Pyper-Ferguson)loses his brother, Michael(Julian Stone), in a shootout where Cold(undercover as a corrupt rogue agent in order to earn the graces of the Donovan brothers), must break cover in order to save Stuart who was captured. Stuart discovers that her superior, Chief agent Greer(Timothy Carhart, wasted)is actually behind the whole Plutonium scheme, the terrorists a foil for his plans. Action fans hoping for martial arts will be disappointed with BLACK DAWN. No snapped wrists or pummeled bodies. Mostly exchanges of gunfire and excess plot. Seagal may get the top billing but Davies does most of the heavy lifting. Long-haired, bearded Pyper-Ferguson makes for a fun snarling villain, but Carhart should've had more to do.

Black Dawn starts at a Federal Prison in Utah where rouge CIA agent & nuclear weapons expert(!) Jonathan Cold (Steven Seagal, also producer) breaks international arms dealer Michael Donovan (Julian Stone) out. Impressed with Cold's efficient work Donovan offers him a job, a job to oversee his buying a new nuclear weapon from some crazy scientist dude & obtaining the plutonium to power it. Jump to Los Angeles where the deal is to take place & where CIA agent & Cold's friend Amanda Stuart (Tamara Davies) has Donovan's brother James (John Pyper-Ferguson) under surveillance, however when she is caught by Donovan's men Cold has to blow his cover & rescue her. Now the Donovan's have plans for a nuclear weapon & the equipment to build it that they intend to sell to a bunch of Russian suicide bombers who intend to become marters when they blow Los Angeles up, that is unless one-man army Cold can stop them...Directed by Alexander Gruszynski this was actually a sequel to Seagal's terrible earlier straight-to-video/DVD action thriller The Foreigner (2003) a couple of years previous in which he played CIA agent Jonathan Cold racing across Europe with a deadly package, so Black Dawn which is titled The Foreigner 2 in some countries moves the story to the US & is the sequel no-one wanted. The plot is short on action & Seagal fans looking forward to some of his trademark martial arts fights will be disappointed as there isn't any, the too complex for it's good plot is all over the place, completely fails to engage or grip & is pretty standard action thriller fare without much action or many thrills. There's this really dumb twist at the end when some guy we have only seen once is revealed to be behind it or something yet for some reason he is there to start the bomb & kill the Russian terrorists, why not just let the Russians start the bomb & blow themselves up & like just make sure your out of Los Angeles well in advance? Why stick around to potentially be blown up in a nuclear holocaust? If Donovan was going to double cross the Russians why was he so bothered about finding the real plutonium? Just give them vials of water or something, how would they know? Open them up & have a taste? I don't think so. The pace is alright & it keeps moving along but the plot is weak, predictable & the character's are forgettable.The action is pretty poor apart from a reasonable car chase involving a huge dumper truck which is quite good & probably belongs in a better film than Black Dawn. The only fight scene in Black Dawn sees one of the worst body doubles ever stand in for Seagal who is fat in this, in fact he is really fat & out of shape in this. This fight is filmed so you never see Cold's face but the stunt doubles body is all wrong & you can just tell it's not Seagal. Other than that it's just a fairly dull succession of shoot-outs between people. There's a big CGI computer effects explosion at the end but if it really was a nuclear bomb there would have been an electro magnetic pulse which would have shut down all electrical equipment including the helicopter Seagal was flying & thus send him crashing into the Ocean but Black Dawn isn't that concerned with factual accuracy.With a supposed budget of about $15,000,000 Black Dawn looks alright, it's a little flat & forgettable but the production values are decent enough. The acting isn't great from no-one of any interest & Seagal again seems dubbed a lot of the time.Black Dawn is a poor action thriller that fails to deliver on any count, it's dull & boring & utterly forgettable. Not quite as bad as The Foreigner but not too far behind it.

Steven Seagal wears a suit and tie for the entirety of the movie. Unfortunately for him, this doesn't help to hide his huge bulk. I spent most of the movie thinking about how fat he's become since the last Seagal movie I watched (which must have been "Hard to Kill").The basic plot of the movie is revealed very early. This is no surprise to anybody. What is a surprise is when there's a gunfight scene and a dozen characters appear who have no other part in this movie and kill each other. Even Steven Seagal has two partners who appear for 1 minute at the beginning of the movie, then 1 minute halfway through the movie, and both are killed only 2 minutes later.The special effects are distracting. There's a scene where the two main characters are sitting in a helicopter on a roof. Except it's not on a roof, it's in the studio and the foreground looks washed out and Steven Seagal's tie flickers due to the blue screen.The DVD cover shows Seagal wearing a black leather jacket - which he does not wear in the movie - and his face has been photoshopped to look younger and thinner than it actually is. The back of the DVD shows Seagal holding two guns crosswise - a technique he does not use in this movie - and indeed it's a younger, fitter Seagal holding those guns, wearing that leather jacket.The "special features" stank too. "Making of Black Dawn" can be summed up as "let's show the main characters filming the helicopter sequence" and Tamara Davies laments that she finds it hard to feel tension when she's sitting in a fake helicopter on the set. Somehow I'm not surprised. And the best she can say about director Gruszynski is that he is "convenient".The "Interview with Steven Seagal" contained some flashed scenes which would have been better off in the "Making of" title. The rest of it wasn't an interview. There was no interviewer, there were no questions. It was Steven Seagal rambling. It sort of devolved into various pictures of Seagal doing humanitarian work in the 3rd world. I'm not quite sure why.Five trailers on the DVD showed 5 Sony movies which, if truth be told, looked much better than this rubbish. Some were Seagal movies, some were Wesley Snipes.This movie isn't worth buying; isn't worth renting either. Seagal should lose some weight and train up before acting again, if he wishes to be the star of an action picture.

Very poor effort from Seagal, who in recent times seems to be churning out films on a weekly basis. This is a conspiracy type movie involving a nuclear weapon falling into the wrong hands (yawn!). Seagals character is a mysterious ex agent with an unclear agenda (what again!). None of us watch Seagal films for his acting prowess, we want to see glib one liners and plenty of scrapping. There is precious little of either in this film and the action scenes that are in it are done by someone else. He doesn't even really feature as the starring role, leaving a bunch of stereotypical bad guys and hired goons to plod through what masquerades as a plot. As if what i've told you is not enough to keep you away from this drivel, it is also worth mentioning that the special effects are truly terrible as well. Finally, to sum up, this film features Luke Goss from that vomit inducing band Bros as the lead bad guy. Watch this and you'll gouge your eyes out.