Steven Seagal's debut film is a numbingly violent thriller that offers us gratuitous blood and bone for the sake of a gasp from the audience. Seagal plays a cop who, naturally, doesn't so much arrest his suspects as take them apart at the seams. He bulldozes his way into something big that involves master hit-men and a senatorial assassination at the end of the line, upsets authority - 'Nico' whispers his wife (Sharon Stone), 'why is the CIA calling you at two in the morning? ' - and finally demolishes the entire china shop. Dislikeable characters throughout make it hard to want to stick around and see what happens to them and the film is dull in between its bursts (or should we say spurts) of violent action. Seagal looked a little long in the tooth to be starting a movie career but, as events proved, both he and director Andrew Davis (who made Under Siege and The Fugitive) were to go on to better things.

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