Why Was Steven Seagal So Popular?
I watched one of his most popular movies looking for answers
I decided to stream Steven Seagal’s 1990 hit action movie Hard To Kill for two reasons: I had never seen it and I wanted to know why this guy was ever a thing. And he was a legitimate box-office thing, starting with his big-screen debut in 1988. Seagal is a demigod in the pantheon of all-American movie champions, a group of handsome men who pretend to punch.
In Hard To Kill, Steven Seagal never sweats nor smiles. For one hour and forty minutes, he grimaces with quiet rage while chopping henchman in the throat with his big tomahawk steak hands. It’s the sort of move made by real men for real men to point at and say, “Yup, that’s a real man.”
There are two women in the movie. They both have sex with Seagal. One of them dies tragically for the sake of the plot. The other woman is a beautiful nurse caring for a John Doe in a coma. There’s a scene where she peeks under the sheets at the patient’s substantial genital organs. Guess what? That John Doe is actually Steven Seagal. Real men have gigantic hogs.
I’m tempted to say he was popular once upon a time but I think he’s still a pop culture icon. He was, after all, a movie star and a musician and from 2009–20014 he was the star of the reality TV show Steven Seagal…
