The Foreigner (2003)

It took three viewings of this movie for me to even get an inkling of what was going on and in the third viewing I actually rewound and watched particularly perplexing parts again. Having said that, the gist of the movie, as far as I could tell, is that a German industrialist, Jerome Van Aken (Harry Van Gorkum), was involved in manufacturing biochemical weapons, using fertilizer plants as a front. Van Aken was supported in this enterprise by the International Security Service Board, an agency operated by Jared Olyphant (Gary Raymond), apparently as a front for the CIA. The chief engineer of the biochemical operation, Stefan Stockwell, was opposed to these circumstances and was on a flight to Greece with evidence to expose the situation. The airplane crashed, killing everyone aboard. However, the flight recorder was missing from the crash. Now, everyone wants the package containing this flight recorder and other evidence linking the CIA and Van Aken to the crash.

Jonathan Cold (Steven Seagal), a former CIA man himself, is asked by a friend, Alexander Marquet (Philip Dunbar) to pick up a package in Versailles and deliver it to Germany. He very reluctantly agrees. He was preparing to leave Paris, where he has been for the last six months in 'retirement', to go to a memorial service for his father, who was the Ambassador to Poland from the US. Marquet sends his henchman, Dunois (Max Ryan) along. At the farmhouse where they are picking up the package they are ambushed by several Dutch gunman and barely escape with the package as the farmhouse goes up in flames. Jonathan realizes that he has seen Dunois at a nightclub with one of the assailants. When they return to Marquet with the package, Jonathan does not want to go any further with it. Marquet convinces him to continue to Germany with the package. Before he leaves, Jonathan lets Marquet know that Dunois knew one of the assailants at the farmhouse.

Jonathan proceeds to Warsaw, Poland, where Jared catches up with him as Jonathan arrives at the airport. Jared tries to convince Jonathan to work with them. Jonathan suggests that training terrorists in Pakistan is not his idea of positive work. Jared urges Jonathan to keep them "informed". Jonathan pronounces him "an asshole" and leaves. At the funeral Jared gives the eulogy for Jonathan's father while Jonathan stands by. Jonathan's brother, Sean (Jeffrey Pierce) is there and tells Jonathan he has been in Poland for six months helping out their father at the Embassy and will be there a bit longer to transition with the next Ambassador.

While waiting to get to Germany, Jonathan calls the number in Germany he was given by Marquet and finds it is the home of Jerome Van Aken. He calls his brother and asks what he knows about Van Aken and Van Aken's wife Meredith (Anna-Louise Plowman). Meanwhile, Marquet summons Dunois and asks if Jonathan is involved in any conspiracy. Dunois says he doubts it. Marquet says he has to send someone he trusts on an errand to New York and asks Dunois if he should send him. Dunois understands that Marquet is actually questioning his trustworthiness and kills him. Dunois heads to Germany and tries to call the Van Aken house too.

Jared has tapped the lines at the Embassy and hears Jonathan's call to Sean asking about Van Aken and his wife. Jared orders Mr. Mimms (Sherman Augustus) to eliminate Jonathan. Jonathan delivers a note to the Van Aken estate and then checks in to the Hotel Terminus to wait. Meredith calls him and asks to meet him to collect the package for her husband. Jonathan identifies himself as Mr. Weber and says his instructions are to deliver the package to her husband, not her. Nevertheless, he agrees to meet with her. When she arrives Jonathan has a total stranger give her the package to maintain his anonymity.

When Jonathan gets back to his room it has been ransacked and he is clubbed over the head. He comes to and the person who clubbed him demands that he take him to the 'real' package. Jonathan asks him which Van Aken he works for. Jonathan tells him it is in a locker at the train station. They go there and get the package. In the men's room the other man starts to open the package and Jonathan dives out the window as the package explodes and destroys a large part of the station. Jonathan calls Meredith and tells her sending someone to kill him was her first mistake and hangs up.

Mimms has gone to the Hotel Terminus to find Jonathan and checks in under Jonathan's name. Dunoir shows up and asks for Jonathan. The clerk will not tell him the room Jonathan is in so he kills her. He goes to the room and Mimms shoots him, causing Dunoir to fall out the window to the ground below.

Jonathan breaks into the Van Aken estate and confronts Meredith while she is taking a bath. He tells her to call her husband but Jerome is not available. He tells her again he was hired to deliver the package to her husband and that is the only way it will be delivered. Mimms has to report to Olyphant that he has not disposed of Jonathan yet. He has learned that Jonathan is driving a silver Mercedes. Jared tells him to take care of it. Mimms follows a silver Mercedes to a gas station where it turns out the driver was paid $2000 to drive the car, presumably by Jonathan. Mimms kills him for his trouble and goes back to looking for Jonathan. Police at the Hotel Terminus find broken glass and a flack jacket below a window but no body.

Dunois is alive. He is at the river with a box he has planted, cleaning his wounds and getting more armaments. Jonathan goes to an abandoned building and opens the real package, finding photographs of Jared and others, clippings about the flight, and the flight recorder box from the airplane that crashed. He takes a CD and puts plastic explosive on it and a timer and leaves. He opens the flight box back in his room and takes out the tape. He calls Meredith and tells her to meet him at the abandoned building. At Jared's behest, Sean calls Jonathan and asks him to stop back to Poland in the next few days. Jonathan tells Sean he is sending something to an old friend of their father's to look at.

Mimms shows up at the Hotel Terminus and confronts Jonathan. Jonathan tells him he will give him much more money than Olyphant is giving him and to come with him. They go to the abandoned building where Jonathan throws the CD at Mimms. It explodes on his chest and propels him out of the building into the river. Dunois shows up and wants the package. Jonathan tells him to go ahead and kill him and then go look for it himself. He also tells him that a watch that was thrown to the ground when he threw the disc at Mimms is a homing device and the CIA will soon be swarming the building.

Meredith arrives, distracting Dunois and Jonathan knocks him out. He and Meredith leave and he gives her the package, telling her he has opened it and asking her why the crash is so important to her and her husband. She tells him about the biochemical work her husband and the CIA were involved in. She says that there is more evidence in a house in Norway that Stefan Stockwell kept all his notes in. Jonathan agrees to take her there and then to Paris.

As his brother requested, Jonathan goes back to Warsaw. Jared's men try to tail them but they lose them. Sean tells Jonathan that according to Jared, Jonathan "fucked up big time" and accuses Jonathan of giving the KGB their father's name to negotiate his way out of prison in Russia. Jonathan tells Sean that Jared is playing him to get to Jonathan. He explains that he was what is known as 'the foreigner', a deep undercover agent in Russia. He was arrested for espionage. Jared and their father could have gotten him out but Jared let him "rot" in a Soviet prison. Sean tells him that Jared can be found at New Town Square. Jonathan goes there and confronts Jared ("Aren't you a little old for this cloak and dagger shit?") and tells Jared to stay away from him. Jared tells him Sean will be there to lend a hand and then tries to shot Jonathan but Jonathan beats him to it and shots him, leaving him to die in the square.

Jonathan and Dunois run into each other at the Van Aken estate and agree to work together to get in. They kill all the guards and get in, whereupon Dunois tries to kill Jonathan so Jonathan shots him. Jonathan finds Jerome Van Aken who insists that Meredith is mentally ill and nothing she has told Jonathan is accurate. He wants to know where she has taken their daughter. He offers to pay Jonathan to find his daughter and bring her back. Jonathan then plays Van Aken the tape from the flight recorder that his father's old friend has put on a disc for him and it clearly reveals the flight being shot down. Van Aken denies he was involved in the crash and claims Stefan knew what they were working on and had no problem with it. Jonathan leaves to find Meredith. Dunois, still alive, confronts Van Aken who tells him his services are no longer needed. Dunois says his client would not agree and kills Van Aken.

Meredith has gone to the farmhouse in Norway and is going over Stockwell's papers when the Dutch assailants who appeared at the Versailles farmhouse show up and tie her and her daughter to chairs and prepare to set the place on fire. Jonathan arrives and saves them and kills the assailants. He takes Meredith and her daughter to Paris. As they are walking on the street a man tries to grab the daughter and Jonathan stops it and tells Meredith to wait in a café with her daughter while he tries to find the man. When he comes back she and her daughter are gone.

Jonathan goes back to his apartment and finds Dunois. Dunois was hired by Meredith to kills her husband. He notes that Jonathan has tried to kill him twice. Jonathan suggests that three times is the charm and they fight with Jonathan finally besting Dunois. Meredith has left a note for him thanking him for his help but saying his services are no longer needed since she has her daughter and that was what she had wanted the package for, to have leverage against her husband to take her daughter away.

It's God-awful. A major problem is that Steven Seagal cannot act his way out of a paper bag, and he is the star of this sorry, convoluted mess. Adding to the bad acting woes of the film are Max Ryan as Dunois, Sherman Augustus as Mimms and pretty much everyone else in the film. Of course the terribly written dialogue and incomprehensible story don't help either. After the third viewing, I still couldn't figure out who the Dutch guys who ambushed them at the Versailles farmhouse AND at the Norway house were working for. Presumably the CIA (?) Honestly, it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

The violence is overwhelming and, ultimately, repellant. We are treated to many slow motion shots of bullets ripping through bodies with blood spattering about in the process. By the end of the film the only members of the cast we have been introduced to who are still alive are Jonathan, his brother, Meredith and her daughter. Many building are blown up or set on fire and we get to see several people on fire, prompting Jonathan to comment at one point about how much he loves a barbeque. The script is replete with such 'bon mots'. Then there is the "sadness" of Jonathan perhaps imagining that he will finally have a quiet life and a family with Meredith and her daughter, only to be left alone again. Truly, he is the spy who cannot come in from the cold (Jonathan Cold, get it?) And I couldn't help noticing that the character's initials are JC, not that I think Steven Seagal has a messiah complex or anything (snicker). Never has so much hugger-mugger amounted to so little. Bottom line-it's absolutely vile.

God love him, he doees the best he can. He comes away with a lot more dignity than anyone else in this disaster. He plays it understated (as opposed to Seagal's comatose style of "acting") as a consummate villain engineering death and destruction in the upper echelons of the shadow government many people view the CIA as being. He conveys the utterly ruthless and amoral psyche of such an individual, enhanced by relentless chain smoking, which apparently is a true sign of evil in films these days, or at least Steven Seagal films (shudder).

He doesn't quite carry off the American accent, but given the dialogue he has to utter, I think he can be forgiven this. His voice still has that wonderful mellifluous richness, in this case with a hint of gravel to go along with the chain smoking. Those of us who love Gary can't help hoping that this is not his final film appearance, especially since he hadn't been in a theatrical film since the 1960s. Hopefully this return to the big screen (or perhaps direct to video since I don't recall this making it to the theaters) will be just the start of more and better (they'd almost have to be) film projects.

Even at 67 Gary still looks great to me. To add to the air of menace they gave him a rather pasty dissipated look in this film but he looks very distinguished in his conservative suits. I could have lived without the big Russian fur hat but I guess it's cold in Poland so he had to keep his precious head warm. He's still tall and lean and looks to be in great shape. He's in better shape than Steven Seagal who is 52 and looks every minute of it, and then some. By the way, the actor who plays Jonathan's younger brother Sean looks about 25. What's with that? It makes about as much sense as anything else going on with this movie. But despite everything it is still fantastic to have a recent performance of Gary's on film/tape/DVD since most of his work over the past thirty years has been in theater.

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