Steven Seagal kills a drug lord named Salazar (Florin Piersic Jr.) during a raid on his palace. As it turns out, Salazar was merely faking his death so he could be a rat for the FBI. When Salazar’s pissed-off crew come after him, it’s up to Luke Goss and a team of U.S. Marshals to protect him. Predictably, double-crosses on both sides ensue.
The framing device where Seagal interrogates Goss is mostly an excuse for him to sit down and not do a whole lot. Although Seagal’s not front and center most of the time (Goss does a lot of the heavy lifting during the middle section), he’s in it more than you’d think. Seagal looks a little more portly than usual, but he appears to be in decent form whenever he’s in the thick of the action. He even seems to be a bit more invested in his performance than usual, which is kind of surprising given his recent work.
This was the tenth collaboration between Seagal and director Keoni Waxman, who delivers a few crisp action beats. The opening raid sequence gets things off to a decent start. It’s here where Seagal gets a legitimately badass moment when a guy on fire is flailing about and Steve blows him away with a shotgun. His final brawl with Georges St-Pierre (who plays Salazar’s right-hand man) is one of his best screen fights in recent memory. Waxman also stages a solid motorcycle shootout in a parking garage, and the part where a bad guy gets his arm blown off during a gun battle was pretty gnarly. All of this doesn’t make Cartels what we would traditionally call a “good” film, but it helps set it apart from many of Seagal’s latter-day DTV efforts.
The fact that this is a better than average Seagal DTV actioner is a bit of a mixed blessing. It’s competent and watchable, and yet it lacks that certain goofiness that makes some of his flicks so endearing. There is one truly chuckle-worthy moment though when Goss tells Seagal something he doesn’t like and Steve retorts with, “I WASN’T BORN ON A TURNIP TRUCK!” I wish there were more choice dialogue like this to go around. If that was the case, Cartels might’ve eked by with a *** rating.
AKA: Killing Salazar.
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