At one point in this movie, Steven Seagal's character, DetectiveJack Cole, beats a lie detector test, prompting the woman administering the thing to comment that she's never seen anything like it before and that anybody who could do what Seagal did "must have total control over his emotions." If this isn't the greatest all-time excuse for bad acting I've ever heard, I'll cast Robert Stack as the protagonist in my directorial debut, "Transvestite Romeo."

Seagal? Total control over his emotions? What emotions? Hollywood producers are becoming so aware that audiences think Seagal is some kind of alien robot that they're inserting scenes into the screenplay to explain his constipated acting style. Pain, tenderness, sadness; Seagal wouldn't know an emotion if it came up to him and chewed off a testicle. He's the acting version of the untrainable pit bull. Sit, Steven! Sit! Act, Steven, Act! Oh, to hell with it. Kill, Steven! Kill! Good dog.

This is one of those cop buddy pictures that's as murky as pea soup. Cole's pal is detective Jim Campbell (Keenen Ivory Wayans), and they have an incredibly shocking personality conflict. To bring them together in common purpose, director John ("Born to Be Wild") Gray introduces as many elements from "Seven" as he can remember, until he figures out he's actually trying to tell a story about the Russian mafia smuggling chemical weapons and drops the whole "Seven" thing half-way through the film.

There are enough ridiculous moments in the film to make another "Naked Gun" picture, but some stand out more than others. For instance, you know the director is really skilled when the cops are riding in their car and he has to show you a shot of the police radio to make sure you understand where the "strange" voices are coming from. And why do people keep attacking Cole one at a time? Don't they learn? I can tell you from personal experience that martial arts is entirely ineffective under a pile of fat, smelly, Russian mobsters.