On Deadly Ground (1994)

On Deadly Ground is a 1994 American environmental action adventure film directed, co-produced by, and starring Steven Seagal, and co-starring Michael Caine, Joan Chen, John C. McGinley and R. Lee Ermey. It is Seagal’s only directorial effort, and features a minor appearance by Billy Bob Thornton in one of his early roles. Seagal plays Forrest Taft, an expert firefighter who decides to fight back against the environmental destruction caused by his ruthless former boss (Caine).

Plot.

Aegis Oil operates in upstream and midstream oil production, and owns various oil refineries and rigs in Alaska, where the company faces great oppositions from the public due to the increasing environmental damage done by its operations. Aegis had purchased the oil production rights from the local Tribal Council 20 years prior; however, the rights will revert to the natives if Aegis 1, the company’s newest oil platform and biggest refinery, is not on-line within a certain deadline. Further, thirteen days before said deadline, provisions of blowout preventers to Aegis turn out to be defective, and shipments of adequate replacements end up being delayed up to 90 days.

Unable to legally complete the rig with safe equipment without missing the deadline and losing the oil rights, Aegis’s CEO Michael Jennings forces his workers to use the substandard preventers. Rig foreman Hugh Palmer is aware of this; as he predicts, his rig suffers a blowout due to the faulty preventer. It takes Forrest Taft, a firefighting and blowout specialist in dealing with oil drilling-related fires, to extinguish the blaze. Initially skeptical of Palmer’s claims, Taft discovers the delays in the equipment shipments via restricted computer files.

Critical response, Box office.

The film received negative reviews and has an approval rating of 12% at rottentomatoes.com. On Metacritic, the film has a score of 33%, based on reviews from 18 critics, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of “B+” on an A+ to F scale. At the time of its release, Gene Siskel included the film in his “Worst of” list for 1994, singling out the melancholy tone of the film and the quality of Seagal’s dialogue. On their syndicated TV show Siskel & Ebert, Siskel called the film’s pyrotechnics “low rent” and stated that he “didn’t think the fight sequences were anything special.” He noted that Seagal’s speech at the end was “more interesting than the actual fighting.” Roger Ebert, for his part, called the speech “absurd” and “shameless” but opined that while “it doesn’t pay to devote close attention to the plot”, “if you like to see lots of stuff blowed up real good, this’d be a movie for you.” The film grossed $38.6 million in the United States and Canada and $78.1 million worldwide against its reported $50 million budget.