Seized (2020)

Posted in Reviews by - December 27, 2020
Seized (2020)

It’s Scott Adkins versus Mexican cartels (again) in his first film with director Isaac Florentine since 2015’s Close Range. Although their latter-day low-budget adventures have slipped into far more generic territory, the duo are still capable of injecting vitality and creativity into their action scenes, turning the most humdrum of stories into something worth watching. This is a good example, with Adkins’ ex-special forces single dad being forced by Mario Van Peebles’ high-tech, benevolent crime lord to drive around the sun-kissed locales of Baja California on a killing spree in a bid to retrieve his kidnapped son. It’s essentially a cheap Taken with both Florentine and Adkins lodged firmly in their comfort zones. There is nothing here to resemble the demanding, impassioned performances we have seen from Adkins in his more recent work with Jesse V. Johnson (Accident Man and, particularly, Avengement). On the contrary, this B-movie throwback feels more closely aligned to the straight-to-video head-kicking pulp of old, with its cliched script, over-the-top violence and narrow view of Mexicans. There’s even a fight in a strip club. So, it’s far from their best work; but there are enough flashes of the old magic to entertain the diehards, and there will always be some value in watching Scott Adkins kill everybody in a room, no matter how bad the movie.

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Editor and creator of Kung Fu Movie Guide and the host of the Kung Fu Movie Guide Podcast. I live behind a laptop in London, UK.

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