MAXIMUM CONVICTION micro review

This is a tale of two Steves, Austin and Seagal; in the 90s, one was a Hollywood action star and the other was a pro wrestler.  Now they're both trying to make it in the tough world of direct to video action movies and the only Steve they can count on is the other.  This is both the premise for the GREATEST meta sitcom ever conceived and the circumstances that created Maximum Conviction.  I think we would have been much happier with the sitcom.

One Steve is an obsessive neat-freak, the other is a total slob.  

Find out which is which this fall on House of Steves!

Thanks to the Expendables films, movie producers have learned that aging action stars get horribly lonely when in a movie by themselves and the only remedy is another aging action star to keep him company.  This mentality has gotten us such modern classics as Hunt to Kill, One in the Chamber, Tactical Force and The Package.  Now that our hero's self esteem is no longer in jeopardy, they can get to doing what they do best:  kick some Terrorist/Mafia/Evil Scientist/Abusive Boyfriend ass!  Unfortunately, Maximum Conviction helps to prove that no theory is perfect.

Action heroes also enjoy a little creme brulee.

One of the biggest problems with having multiple action stars is having multiple big paychecks for them; this leaves the rest of the production with a whopping $500 to spend (rough estimate based on the actual quality of the film).  So much money was spent putting these action movie titans on screen together (which only actually happens in about 5 shots) that the rest of the movie looks like it was shot guerilla-style in a high school after class ended for the summer.

In the producers' defense, it was probably an inner city school....

All this might be forgivable if the movie was actually entertaining.  The dialogue feels like it was written by a 12 year old, the fight scenes are incomprehensible (Seagal is doubled for most of his), and the overlong gunfights seem to degenerate into guys shooting at each other from cover until either someone accidentally gets hit or I get bored and start daydreaming about better action movies.

Don't pout Seagal!  At least you got paid to suffer through this, the rest of us 

have to make up the time to ourselves.

Ten years ago, the prospect of an Austin/Seagal team up would have been beyond exciting; Austin was at the top of his game in WWE, Seagal actually bothered to do his own fight scenes, and producers still pretended to give a rat's ass about their DTV action movies.  But it's 2013, so we got a cheap, boring cash grab hoping to wring a little bit more money out of the poor fans of these two stars.  Yes, it's free on Netflix....  No, i cannot in good conscience recommend you watch it.  But if they ever do make House of Steves, you should definitely watch that!

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