Above the Law (1988)

Above the Law arrives from 1988 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is: a star vehicle built around a man who had never acted before and could, by all accounts, break a wrist on command. Steven Seagal plays Nico Toscani, an Italian immigrant, former CIA operative, and Chicago detective who discovers that the agency he once served is running drugs and torturing priests. Andrew Davis shoots the city with affection and stages the aikido with a certain instructional clarity. The picture is regarded as the first American production to put aikido in fight sequences, a distinction that carries weight in some circles and none in others.

Pam Grier appears as Delores Jackson, Nico's partner, a Black woman with a badge and a caseload in a 1988 action picture. This is the film's one measurable gesture toward contemporary casting sensibilities, and it is a real one, though the script asks little of her beyond competence and a well-timed quip. Sharon Stone plays the wife. The villains are CIA men and a Salvadoran drug lord, which makes the film's animating suspicion institutional, not economic. No one lectures. No one monologues about the planet, the patriarchy, or the arrangement of wealth. The film prefers to settle its arguments with a broken nose, and there is something almost restful about that.

Critics were split at the time. Ebert gave it three stars and admitted the lead did not look or sound like an actor. Leonard Maltin was less generous. The verdict here is a film of limited cultural ambition and steady forward momentum, its social consciousness confined to who gets to stand beside the star.