After a drug bust in Colombia goes sour, disillusioned DEA agent John Hatcher (Steven Seagal) quits the force. He returns home to reconnect with his family only to find his small American town overrun with violent Jamaican drug-dealers led by a maniacal, voodoo-energized kingpin called Screwface (Basil Wallace). Waging a turf war with a rival Columbian cartel Screwface's gun-toting cronies shoot up a bar forcing Hatcher to intervene. Hatcher's heroism enrages Screwface. It is not long before a hit squad reaches his home as our crusading cop learns his family are... wait for it... marked for death.
At the peak of his popularity in the early Nineties, Steven Seagal headlined a string of slick action vehicles with production values a cut above the direct-to-video dreck he cranks out to this day. Of course while Seagal's films were more polished than say, Chuck Norris' output at Cannon Films, they were no less dumb. Marked for Death stands out by virtue of being one of his wilder, weirder movies pitting the pony-tailed pugilist against a horde of comic book Jamaican stereotypes and a dreadlocked rasta-masta with honest-to-god voodoo powers. Hence an air of mysticism hangs over the evil antics of Screwface. He moves like a ghost, appears in many places at once, casts runes to foretell the future, smears chicken blood on intended victims and appears indestructible. As a bonus horror veteran Dwight H. Little adds a scene where a sexy Santeria priestess bathes in milk and slaughters yet another chicken just to up the gratuitous black magic nudity quotient.
Sadly the film squanders this promising premise on a routine shoot-'em-up. Even Joanna Pacula's voodoo expert, seemingly set up as an invaluable ally or at the very least a potential love interest (given she all but melts at the first sight of John Hatcher), has next to no impact on the pedestrian plot. The villains may as well be Italian mobsters or Middle Eastern terrorists for all the difference it makes. Their sole function is to piss Seagal off enough to do his thing. This they do by machine-gunning his family home and hospitalizing his cute little niece played by future scream queen Danielle Harris, veteran of Little's Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Meyers (1988). Yet while Little manages to weave an intriguingly eerie atmosphere around Screwface, his pacing of the all-important action scenes is sluggish. Seagal's much-vaunted martial arts prowess relies overtly on choppy editing that proves more confusing than compelling.
The script tries to hammer home the message that Hatcher is wrong to bury his head in the sand when there is so much worth fighting for but Seagal's surly persona proves more hindrance than help. Your traditional action hero rallies their community to take a moral stand. Hatcher might care about his family but appears indifferent to everyone else. He threatens criminals and civilians alike, right down to the doctor treating his niece, and nonchalantly plows his car through a crowded restaurant and shopping mall. Like many action heroes of his ilk, Seagal's characters are cut-rate imitations of Clint Eastwood that miss the point. Dirty Harry was frustrated with the system not contemptuous of society. Special guest appearance from Jimmy Cliff who performs a reggae theme song co-written by Steven Seagal!
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