Typical Steven Seagal
It's all here, stock footage (it's now older and grainier than ever), stunt doubles, bad voice dubbing, eastern european locations and actors, dark shots and shadows to hide Seagals double chin and fake hair (that's where they came up with the title 'Shadow man' a couple of years earlier, he's allways in the shadows!).
And on top of all that, it's a re-make of a Michael Dudikoff flick!
Well it's still better than Attack force (that's not saying much).
If I have understood right, the writer of the original Dudikoff film, William C. Martell heard of this film on the internet for the first time, the writers and producers of Flight of fury had been making a re-make of 'Black thunder' without the original writer knowing it.
Nice going guys!
The cinematography for the new footage they shot for FOF is ok, but that doesn't save this movie, this is really bad.
They have used the oldest trick in the b-movie trick book.
They basically buy some footage of jets and planes from some old movies for cheap, and build the movie around it.
The majority of the movie takes place in only a few sets.
That's cool, I would use the same trick myself, but this is a Steven Seagal movie with a reported budget of 12 million dollars. They're trying to do something they can not, Flight of fury probably cost a lot less than 12 million dollars, either that or most of the money went to the producers pockets or Seagal used it to buy Krispy kreme donuts for "the crew".
And last, we come to Seagal's "acting".
We know he can't act his way out of a paperbag as they say, everybody knows that, but it seems like he isn't even trying to LOOK like he's acting anymore.
In his older movies he at least showed some emotions and fitted in those badass roles perfectly.
Now he doesn't even bother to speak normally, he whispers his every line and takes a deep breath after every half of a sentence. I don't know if he's trying to act tough or if he has asthma, it just doesn't work.
And everytime we see him whispering his lines he's in the darkness, sometimes if we're lucky we might see some light on his eyes maybe.
Even when he's outside in sunshine he magically appears to stay in shadows everytime we see a close up of him.
I just miss those good old action movies, Where's Chuck Norris or Arnold Schwarzenegger when you need them?
Well at least Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone are coming back.
The good thing is, Steven Seagal can only go up from here, unless he makes another Attack Force.