Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

movieman_kev This abysmal little film about an archaeologist (Steven Seagal) who's framed for the murder of his friend but gets out to get revenge on a Chinese crime syndicate is amateurish in just about ever conceivable way. Horrible acting, a ridiculous plot hole laden plot, laughably bad special effects, surprisingly even the action scenes are lacking. It's one of the worst Seagal films that I've had the supreme misfortune of seeing.My Grade: D-Eye Candy: Kata Dobo, no stranger to baring skin in supremely awful films (see also the atrocious "Rollerball" remake) gets topless

disdressed12 maybe i need to have my head examined,but i thought this was a decent enough Steven Seagal flick.no,it won't win any awards,and yes there are a lot of logic gaps,but honestly there are a lot worse movies inflicted on the public than this.there is more than enough action in my mind,and the fight sequences were not horrible by any stretch.you will really have to stretch you suspension of disbelief here though if you want to buy Seagal as an archaeologist.but as a time waster,you could do worse than this,in my opinion.and besides it's less than ninety minutes long,so it's not like you're losing a big chunk of your life.for me,Out for a Kill is a 5/10

Scarecrow-88 Chinese crime families from major cities all over the world are uniting to control the marketing of drugs, eliminating any competition(as we see in the opening regarding a massacre in a Bulgaria strip club). Steven Seagal stars as an archaeologist(!), Professor Robert Burns, a recipient of the prestigious Winthrope award for uncovering important Chinese artifacts. Burns gets caught up in the midst of an attempted drug smuggling operation with the Chinese crime family using his archaeological dig recovering Chinese relics at the China/Kazakhstan boarder as a front to traffic heroine in the centuries-old statuettes. His assistant killed by gunfire, Burns makes it to the boarder, but is arrested for his possible involvement in smuggling the drugs in his artifacts. Released, Burns has revenge on his mind, but when Wong Dai(Chooi Kheng-Beh)sends his men on an errand to kill Robert's wife, the scorned professor will surely wreak vengeance on all who took away everything he ever cared for. Working with Hong Kong DEA agent Tommi Ling(Michelle Goh), and her American partner Ed Grey(Corey Johnson), Burns will annihilate each member of Wong Dai's crime family, setting his sights for the ringleader, who is stationed in Paris.Globe-trotting action adventure vehicle for Seagal has his martial arts Buddhist archaeologist taking out Chinese druglords in Chinatown, Bulgaria, and Paris. Like other 2003 action flicks, Seagal is able to look good thanks to careful camera angles, editing, and stunt work. We all know he can no longer propel himself in the air or move across a room like a gazelle. Good use of slow motion allows Seagal to obliterate opponents in a manner that seems quite authentic. I will say that there's one sequence, concerning a heavy dependence of wire-fu where Seagal's adversary can twist and turn in mid air, not to mention crawl across walls, looks positively ridiculous, quite laughably staged. Like most of his action flicks in the 2000's, Seagal's one-man army can go wherever he pleases, leaving an alarming string of dead bodies, without anyone even attempting to investigate him. He can go to Bulgaria and Paris without a hitch, despite his house being bombed and wiping out a number of men in a New York City restaurant in front of witnesses. Where Seagal is at his best is when he has those fast hands moving, blocking punches, and landing blows that send his foes hurling in the air and through objects. There are plenty of guns firing and thugs for Seagal to vanquish, and his Robert Burns goes through the motions with relative ease. The members of the Chinese crime gang all have nicknames and specific writings on their arms which forms a riddle, for which Burns soon interprets at the end. Well, on the bright side, at least there isn't a kidnapped daughter Seagal must rescue this time.

James Hitchcock This is a film which asks its audience to accept that Steven Seagal is "Yale's most distinguished academic". An interesting idea for a competition might be to ask people to try and come up with a more egregious example of miscasting than that one. John Wayne as a drag queen? Woody Allen as a heavyweight boxing champion? Arnold Schwarzenegger as a seven-stone weakling? How about Steven Seagal as the world's greatest actor? Actually, even asking the audience to accept Seagal as a moderately competent actor might be a bit much. Make no mistake, this is a bad film indeed. It only gets a second star because it never quite plumbs the awesome depths of badness achieved by Seagal's other 2003 film with director Michael Oblowitz, "The Foreigner". The seventeenth-century poet John Dryden, comparing his detested rival Thomas Shadwell with other minor literary figures of the day, wrote:-"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence But Shadwell never deviates into sense". A similar distinction applies here. Whereas "The Foreigner" never deviates into sense, or comes within a thousand miles of doing so, "Out for a Kill" does at least make pretence to some faint meaning. Seagal's character, Robert Burns, is Professor of Archaeology at Yale University. (Burns was originally a master thief specialising in stealing Chinese antiquities, and gained his degree while serving a prison sentence. I doubt if in real life Yale would have awarded a professorship to a man with this particular curriculum vitae, but the film is presumably set in a parallel universe where seats of learning are happy to offer academic chairs to convicted felons). While on a dig in a remote part of China, he unwittingly becomes embroiled with a gang of drug-runners and he is framed on false charges of narcotics smuggling and the murder of his assistant, who was shot dead by the gang. He is released from jail by a Chinese cop (named Tommy despite being female) and her American colleague who hope that, back in America, he will lead them to the criminal masterminds behind the drug-smuggling operation. Unfortunately, the villains have not finished with Burns, and his wife is killed by a bomb intended for him. He sets out to get revenge, and the film turns into the normal Seagal mixture of gunplay and martial-arts sequences. It was ironically appropriate that in "The Foreigner" Seagal played a character named Jonathan Cold, because his performance seemed to come straight from the deep freeze. Perhaps he and Oblowitz recognised this unfortunate irony, because in "Out for a Kill" his character has a surname suggestive of heat rather than coldness. His style of acting, however, remains as frozen as ever. Burns suffers a series of disasters to rival the Book of Job, but neither being imprisoned on false charges, nor the destruction of his home, nor the murder of his wife, can elicit any degree of emotional reaction from him. Not that the rest of the cast are any better. In "Under Siege" Seagal made the mistake of playing against a major Hollywood star, Tommy Lee Jones, whose acting skills served to underline his own deficiencies in that direction. At least he avoids that mistake here. The way in which the villains are played implies a racist view of the Chinese, little changed since the days of those old Fu Manchu movies. The main difference is that the criminal mastermind Wong Dai is played by a Chinese actor instead of Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee, but the impression is still given that the entire Chinese race, except for attractive women like Tommy, consists of fiendish Oriental villains. About all one can say in the film's defence is that some of the martial-arts sequences are reasonably well done. Overall, however, this is the sort of cheap, shoddy and racist actioner which I had hoped Hollywood had given up making years ago. 2/10