I watched this mess of a film because I had 80 minutes to spare and it was currently on TV, and even though I was even expecting it to be "so bad it's good", I was disappointed because this movie is "so bad it's just bad".
The plot is a needlessly convoluted mess about a team of 3 ex-secret agents (or something like that) played by the geriatric Steven Seagal, Russell Wong and Jemma Dallender, that get hired by the US government to prevent a meeting between Mexican drug cartels and Islamic terrorists (the 2 most frequent villains in Seagal's movies are now combined together) that's set to take place in Istanbul. Steven Seagal is known for repetative fight scenes in which he curbstomps hundreds of bad guys, but here he doesn't even do that (since he got too old for that) and instead spends almost all of his screentime either sitting behind a desk or sitting in cars. There is maybe 4 minutes max of fighting in the whole movie - brief scenes in which Seagal and Russell Wong beat up and shoot several henchmen, and it's filmed with so much shaky-cam and frame cuts that it's almost unwatchable. Also, the worst part about this movie is that, since it probably went through numerous re-edits in postproduction, there are several scenes which seem like they were made from various different footage that was re-edited and spliced together quite clumsily. This is most obvious in the epilogue, where after completing their mission, the heroes go on a new adventure, but this clearly consists out of just random shots seen in previous scenes shown again in a different context.
Also, even though all Steven Seagal does here is sit and talk, he can't even do that right because his voice sounds so unnatural and weird, like a child with a sore throath is trying to talk like a tough guy.
Review of Contract to Kill
