>There’s another what-the-fuck? moment a little later on, but this one is intentional. Sunti is driving Hopper around when a woman with a scarf on her head stops them by standing in the middle of the road. Sunti asks, “Is this woman crazy?” but Hopper seems to understand what’s going on. He gets out and she wordlessly leads him into a small bar and into a back room where she unwraps her scarf and drops her robe, showing off what we in America would refer to as “a nice rack.” She dips a towel in a bowl of water and squeezes drops over her breasts, revealing some kind of invisible-ink tattoo. And Hopper nods that he understands. No explanation offered, but we can assume the tattoo tells him where to go in the next scene to meet up with Mongkol. In other words, terrorists sent him a tittygram.

>General Jantapan does put up a fight. In fact, he (or somebody working with him) actually steals a t-shirt from Hopper’s luggage so that he can present it to the aforementioned evil sorcerer guy in some sort of mystical ceremony in a temple full of tarantulas, scorpions and demon statues. The sorcerer uses the shirt (which we never saw Hopper wear, but I guess he packed for non-robe wearing situations) to make a voodoo doll that he keeps in a box of worms and sticks pins in during the fight. It’s good to see a villain really going out of his way to prepare for a fight in advance. Good work General Jantapan, even though you’re an asshole who consorts with demonic scorpion lovers.
>Hopper does his homework too though, and goes to Sunti’s former Buddhist master to get a magic protective medallion to wear during the fight. I never heard of magic necklaces in Buddhism but I guess a lama like Seagal would know better than I would. He gets to wear it because “Everything you are doing is for love.”

>The climactic showdown with General Jantapan (after Hopper and Sunti have found the girls) is a real showstopper. My favorite part is when the general stands directly across the room from Hopper shooting arrows at him. That’s not a situation you want to get in, but Hopper knows what to do. Out For a Kill had a Matrixy CGI bullet effect that was kind of embarrassing, but this one I have to say is pretty god damn awesome. Hopper takes aim and shoots an arrow with his gun, breaking it in half and knocking it off its trajectory so it won’t hit him. Another arrow comes at him and we see it reflected in his eye before he spins around, grabs a sword and uses it to bisect the arrow in mid-air. Fuck arrows.
>As they continue the fight, we go to the evil temple where the bearded guy sticks pins in the voodoo doll, causing some serious pain for Hopper. But then the voodoo doll bursts into flames. An Evil Dead type camera flies from the evil temple to the Buddhist temple to show us that all the monks are praying like crazy, giving Hopper the Mystical Buddhist Ass Kicking Powers he needs to defeat the general

>And I think there’s a little bit more to the movie than you’ll notice at first, a little bit of symbolism boiling beneath the surface. Although Jake Hopper is a former CIA agent (and does freelance work), he does not trust military and intelligence agencies to save his daughter when she’s kidnapped. Instead he turns to what many Seagal characters would call “the spirit world,” asking for the blessing of a Buddhist master before he embarks. Before the final battle he goes to the master again and is given a magical medallion; the whole temple prays for him while he fights and that’s what defeats the evil voodoo mojo that threatens to kill him. But ultimately, the guys he’s fighting against are corrupt military and police officials, and their opposing philosophies are illustrated by the objects they destroy during the battle. The police fire machine guns into a shelf full of books and Buddha heads, representing their opposition to or at least their ignorance of wisdom and spirituality. For his part, Hopper throws a spear that impales a portrait of a general, showing his lack of respect for man-made authority. He also destroys what looks like a trophy case, a symbol of materialist achievements.

>One motif that doesn’t quite pan out, but ought to, is the fruits and vegetables motif. We learn from the Post-it notes in the refrigerator that Jessica is looking out for her dad’s health, demanding “NO RED MEAT! (I’M SERIOUS!!!!).” Later, Hopper gets into a brawl in a Bangkok vegetable market. His opponents use knives and cleavers stolen from the produce stands, but Hopper just uses his hands, throwing the thugs into piles of vegetables. Meanwhile, the mysterious evil shaman (in his only appearance until the very end of the movie) looks on from the meat department, with poultry hanging all around him.
>The kicker is when the last henchman standing tries to run away. He steps on a tomato that pops and causes him to trip and slide across a long table of fish and smash his face into a meat cleaver. The power of produce turns this guy into meat. Hopper’s connection to fruits and vegetables is later reaffirmed when General Jantapan destroys an apple using the same bow and arrow he will later use against Hopper.

(Belly of the Beast)

(Out of Reach)
>I think Faisal pictures himself as a poetic John Woo type of villain, but he sure doesn’t pull it off. He likes to do fancy shit like burn a rose while musing, “Pretty, isn’t it? But like any rose, a company must cut its thorns.” You call that a villainous speech? It doesn’t even make sense. Companies don’t have thorns. Roses don’t cut their own thorns. And why are you burning it if the point you’re making is about cutting it? You’re cluttering this whole thing up. I’m sorry Faisal, you are undeniably villainous, because upstanding citizens don’t kidnap orphan girls and auction them off on the internet. But you sure don’t know how to talk like a villain. Just keep your fuckin mouth shut if you want people to think you know what you’re doing. Or at least work on that rose-burning bit a little before the next time you say it to some lady you’re about to kill. It needs a lot of polishing.
>And as long as I’m criticizing Faisal I should probably point out that this punk does the wussiest thing a villain has ever done in a Seagal movie: he drugs a 13-year-old girl. I mean, we all understand why somebody might be drugged in a detective or spy story where a femme fatale or some other treacherous backstabber needs to take a powerful opponent by surprise. But for God’s sake man you’re telling me you’re afraid of a little girl when she’s conscious? Shit man, get out your fencing sword if you need that to threaten her. Anything besides drugging her.

>I mean think about it. When you try to insult somebody’s manhood, you compare him to a little girl. “You hit like a little girl,” or “I’m gonna make you cry like a little girl” or whatever. Here is a villain who can’t handle an actual, literal little girl. I can’t believe I’m actually seeing this.
>Even before the drugging he’s playing chess with her and keeps saying those type of sinister villain lines that are supposed to sound innocuous but actually be threatening. And the shit is just embarrassing because we’ve seen this metaphor before. We know what chess means. It’s a battle of wits. Between a grown man and a 13 year old girl. And then she gets woozy and he says, “Check mate.” In my opinion this is cheating at both real chess and metaphorical chess.

(Submerged)
>Seagal plays incaracerated mercenary Chris Cody. Last time he was free, the military hired him to stop terrorists who had loaded the Damascus with explosives. Cody was on a sub and was supposed to lead “his crew” onto the Damascus Casey Ryback style to save the day. He knew it wouldn’t work so he forced the sub to torpedo the Damascus, thus preventing what his commanding officer describes as “another 9-11, except at sea.”
>Cody isn’t introduced until 12 minutes into the movie, and they try to make his entrance count. He’s led in on shackles with rockin guitars playing to show he’s a badass. They convince him to do another mission for them. He will get to bring his crew with him and if they succeed they will get $100,000 each and their freedom. All they gotta do is rescue these five prisoners and deal with the mystery man whose face wasn’t shown on the spy drone footage earlier. I’m not sure how they figured it out, but now they know he’s Adrian Lehder (Nick Brimble, Out of Reach), and they want him terminated on sight.
>They also have to bring along an asshole agent named Fletcher (William Hope, Aliens, Hellraiser II, xXx) who Cody immediately ditches. [...] Cody stops to pick up an old friend (girlfriend?) who is introduced in the middle of a strip arm-wrestling tournament [...] the detour does allow Fletcher to beat them to the dam/laboratory and conspire with the evil scientist Lehder, who he turns out to be in cahoots with. In cahoots on what, I cannot be certain. It involves selling mind control for private use by corporations, I believe. Something like that.

>In the lab they have the five prisoners in hanging cages. Lehder leaves them as a “Trojan horse” – Cody’s team will rescue them and then the mind control will kick in and the prisoners will fight back. But that plan alone wouldn’t allow for enough explosions so Fletcher also arranges to “give them a welcome South American style” with an army of mercenaries.
>They manage to get all the prisoners onto the submarine. What submarine, you ask? I don’t know, I’m not clear when this became part of the plan but for some reason there is a submarine there that they always planned to escape on. This is the submarine you’ll see on the cover and for just over 15 minutes in the movie. They’re in the sub with the rescued prisoners chained up, but the prisoners turn into assassin drones, escape their chains, and blow up the submarine.

So the only thing that keeps you interested are the weird bits, the incompetent bits, the things where you can’t figure out what they were going for. The main one you gotta wonder about is this Cody character. He sometimes talks with a goofy accent that I’m guessing is supposed to be Cajun, but they never mention anything about where he’s from or his ethnic background. He’s constantly referring to Jones’s character Henry as “alligata.” [...]
>But there’s one bit that makes it seem like he’s not even supposed to be white. He tells Henry/alligata, “You got ten minutes to get yo white ass outta here, ya hear me?” He has had an interest in white asses ever since The Glimmer Man, I guess.
>He does have a couple lines that made me laugh. In one scene he just yells “COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKER!” for some reason. Also I think it’s funny when the ambassador is at gunpoint, giving Lehder important bank account access codes over the phone, and Cody just takes the phone and says, “Lehder, why is it that, uh, everything has to be about money?” (I’m not sure why they didn’t shoot the ambassador and Cody at that point, but it was nice that he was able to get a little smartass line in.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOSu0WiwTdw

>The screenplay for Submerged was heavily reworked to the point where the basic premise of the movie was completely changed. Scott Coulter, visual effects producer for Submerged, Today You Die and Mercenary For Justice, told the Fangoria horror magazine that Submerged had “started out as a monster film, but became an action movie during the development process.” (He also said that the title had changed to The Enemy Within.) Even the final, non-mutant-involving film was advertised by Movies Unlimited with an outdated description [...]
>The tagline on teaser posters was, “At 20,000 fathoms the only creature more dangerous than a biological mutant is... man.” Maybe this explains why horror director Hickox got involved in the first place. [...]
>But according to Joe Halpin, who was not credited but was involved in the production, “Steven didn’t like the mutant spiders that were in the original script and the studio agreed. It was changed into a straight action flick. Why the title remained Submerged is beyond me since they were only under water for a few minutes.”