hyped garbage

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The acting in this movie is really good.

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

Steven Seagal has done some good, or at least watchable, films. Particularly 'Under Siege'. He has also done a lot of mediocre and less films, indicative of laziness and that Seagal was well past his sell by date, and a good deal of them are even very bad.'Contract to Kill' is one of the very bad ones. Awful even, and for me if ranking Seagal's filmography from best to worst it would be towards the bottom. Did not expect much, but watched it because Seagal has shown signs that he can be halfway decent and as said not all his films are bad. Also do appreciate the action genre and there are good films out there in the genre, classics even. 'Contract to Kill' is far from that, more closer to a waste of time that shows little signs of trying.Seagal himself gives another lazy and wooden performance that shows that he was not interested and wanted to be somewhere else. His reading-from-an-autocue-like and robotic line delivery in particular betrays that. The rest of the cast are just as poor though in all fairness have little to work with.The characters are ones we know very little about and don't care what happens to happen, so unengaging and one-dimensional they are. The dialogue is risible, with a lot of cheesiness, awkwardness and far too much talk delivered with little emotion or momentum and bordering on the near-incomprehensible.Its excessively talky nature affects severely the pacing, which never comes to life. There is no urgency, let alone tension, intrigue or suspense. The action doesn't feature enough in comparison and suffer from pedestrian choreography and bacon-slicer-like editing. The story is by-the-numbers, dull and not always easy to follow.Direction is flat and ill-at ease, while the sound/soundtrack are one-note and obvious as well as poorly recorded and the whole film looks cheap. And it's not just the editing, the slapdash special effects, drab photography and laughably bad green screen (that was too obvious and jarring) are just as bad.Hate to say it, but to me nothing works in 'Contract to Kill' and it is an awful mess in every way. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Steven Seagal made some semi-cool action movies in the late 80's and early 90's, but this is one is about as bad as it gets.Sure, you can watch this if you want a good laugh. But if you like Seagal you'd be better off watching "Nico" or "Under Siege" once more instead of this garbage.Seagal is in fact the best actor in this thing, and that says a lot. Just listen to the two, soon to be dead, guys in the opening scene, and you'll understand how bad the actors are in "Contract To Kill". In addition to that the special effects are laughable (watch the plane explosion), the dialogue awful (f**k this, f**k that) and the editing is poorly done.Fast forward to Seagal's fighting scenes. They are still pretty fun to watch.

In the bonus segment of the DVD of "Contract to Kill," we see the film's direction instructing an actor playing a corpse, "Stop breathing!" In another scene, the assistant director discusses how he plans to get one of the actors "airborn." These directorial challenges point to the essence of this film as a martial arts flic.Steven Seagall recycles the single character for which he is known: a super hero thwarting a horde of dastardly villains. In this film, he team up with a man and a woman in a kind of autonomous CIA unit. The first goal is to thwart an important meeting of a drug cartel and a terrorist group in Istanbul.The plot thickens when it turns out that beyond the meeting, one of the terrorists is planning to infiltrate America. So, the action shifts to locating and liquidating the villain.While there are some first-rate martial arts sequences, the film gets bogged down in inconsequential dialogue and slow-paced drones tracking the villains.The gravely-voiced Seagal is good in his familiar character, and he is supported by a solid cast. But "Contract to Kill" needed some tightening in the script and more fully developed characters to sustain interest. There was a lot of cross and "double cross" in this film. But the real double cross was on the audience, who did not walk away from a very memorable film.

In this movie Steven has a relationship with someone at-least half his age and there is some sexual content in this movie too. I found that pretty disturbing actually.The actors in the movie sound like they're reading up a script. The set of the movie is default American-Patriotic.Steven is hardly opening is mouth as he is speaking, making his long dialogues difficult to follow.A handful of elements in the film are repeated about 3 times, also a piece of an airplane blowing out of the sky. The first time is good. The second time is a tad annoying. Every other time is just an insult to the person looking the movie.In several situations you expect some appropriate "speed of handling" would be needed and expected yet the actors walk at a pace like they're in no rush at all. Just doesn't add up to the tiny bit of realism that you are hoping to find in the movie that already has this unrealistic story line.It's a definite NO for me...