THAT NOTED mystic, existentialist and philosopher, Steven Seagal, makes his return in a predictably awful – but mercifully brief – actioner that doesn’t even have the quotient of decent fights you might feel entitled to expect, but at least doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a formulaic genre outing aimed squarely at brain-dead teenage boys.

Seagal plays a cop on the trail of a serial killer who specialises in slaughtering entire families, and he rushes around trying to find the guy and stomping a few heads in the process, ably assisted by the obligatory black sidekick (Keenan Ivory Wayans). This is all as idiotic as it sounds, but believe it or not, I found it genuinely entertaining in a weird sort of way. There’s a perverse pleasure to be derived from watching Seagal’s attempts at acting: he has the sort of emotional range that makes Jean-Claude Van Damme look like Gerard Dépardieu. At one stage, he discovers that his wife has been viciously hacked to pieces, and he reacts with the sort of ‘oh, botheration’ indifference that befits a man whose watch has just stopped.

The expected action sequences are far too thin on the ground, the performances are uniformly wooden, and it’s the sort of movie you feel you’ve seen a thousand times before; but The Glimmer Man is so unambitious in its scope that it doesn’t exactly come as a disappointment. The only remotely noteworthy thing about it is the visible deterioration of Seagal’s appearance: older, tubbier and less physically intimidating than he has been in the past, there are definite hints here that this might be his last major appearance as an action superhero. A prediction which appears to be backed up by The Glimmer Man’s relatively dismal performance at the box-office since its British release.

Short of an unfortunate genetic accident, we are unlikely to see such a maverick genius again. (CF)