CONTRACT TO KILL (2016) **

Steven Seagal has been Hard to Kill.  He’s gone Out for a Kill.  He’s even been Driven to Kill.  This time around, he's got a Contract to Kill. 

Seagal plays a former assassin who is lured out of retirement.  His mission:  Bust up a meeting between the Mexican drug cartel and an Islamic terrorist cell.  Seagal soon learns he and his team are merely a pawn in a bigger government scheme.

If you can get past the talky first half, you’ll be treated to some OK action.  Like most of the films Seagal makes for director Keoni Waxman, Contract to Kill has more action than many recent Seagal outings.  The fights are your typical Seagal slap-happy affairs.  Sometimes, the rapid-fire editing turns them into a near incoherent mess. The knife and sword fights are slightly better, if only because they're punctuated by someone getting a sword to the head or knife to the throat.  

Seagal is also more liable to get up and walk around for Waxman and does so again here.  There are only a handful of scenes of Seagal sitting around doing nothing.  (He does have one fight scene while sitting down though.)  Contract to Kill is a little low on late-era Seagal goofiness, but we do get a funny scene of a drone flying around carrying a machine gun. 

Waxman also has the uncanny ability to get Seagal to share scenes with other actors.  In most of his recent films, Seagal has been obviously inserted into the scene after the fact.  In Contract to Kill, he actually appears in several two-shots with other actors, which is a little jarring if you’ve become accustomed to seeing him awkwardly edited into dialogue scenes in recent years.  

Giving Seagal a team to work with is beneficial.  That way, he can delegate duties to others while sitting down.  Not only do these scenes help disguise the fact that Seagal has just spent five minutes of screen time sitting down, they also serve a plot function.  (These scenes are similar to the True Justice TV show in many ways.)  If filmmakers can find more justifiable reasons for Seagal to spend most of his screen time sitting down without being so obvious about it, I’d say he still has a long career ahead of him.