# Fire Down Below (1997)

### reviewed by
James Sanford

Steven, Steven, Steven. Your movies used to be fun to watch. ``Hard To Kill,'' ``Marked For Death,'' the first ``Under Siege'': terrific stuff.

But somewhere along the line Mr. Seagal changed and so did his films. It's not enough for them to be simple entertainment now; these days, they have to carry foreboding messages about social responsibility and ecology.

They also have to carry Seagal himself, which is too much for any movie to bear. Early in his career, Seagal seemed to have a sense of humor about himself: Recently, he's become a vainglorious joke.

Barbra Streisand is often accused of admiring herself too much but she's got nothing on Seagal, whose latest epics devote substantial portions of their footage to lovingly lit close-ups of their star.

At least Streisand has reasonably reliable taste in scripts. Seagal chooses projects like ``Fire Down Below,'' which, despite its title, has nothing to do with Bob Seger or sailors on shore leave. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with entertainment either.

Instead, ``Fire'' relies on the timeworn tale of tight-lipped country folk hiding a dirty secret, in this case an underground stockpile of toxic chemicals. Some of these poisons have been leaking into the water supply, killing fish and giving some of the young'uns powerful rashes.

So EPA investigator Jack Taggart (guess who) goes undercover in the rural hamlet of Jackson, Ky., as a minister's assistant. To make sure he blends in with the locals, Jack packs a dazzling array of expensive custom leather jackets, sporting everything from fringe to candy-stripes, and to get maximum use from this wardrobe he changes coats at least a couple of times a day.

That's typical of the foolishness that runs throughout ``Fire Down Below,'' even behind the scenes. While Seagal poses and preens, he warbles several country-fried tunes offscreen, and suffice to say there won't be a run on the soundtrack album.

Marg Helgenberger takes her best stab at playing Jack's love interest, the kind of tormented backwoodsy recluse Helen Reddy used to sing songs about. The stultifying aw-shucks courtship between the two is like a nightmarish version of ``The Bridges of Madison County,'' and an incest subplot involving Helgenberger and her wild-eyed brother (Stephen Lang) is laughably mishandled.

A slumming Kris Kristofferson drops by a few times as a generic corporate meanie, a sleazy casino owner who has a bedroom adjacent to his business office. His redneck henchmen seem to exist solely so that Jack can snap their bones and they can sing his praises afterward, noting ``I've never been hit so hard in my life!'' and ``I think he broke my jaw!''

Like his earlier turkey ``On Deadly Ground,'' ``Fire Down Below'' also makes time for Seagal to - quite literally - take the pulpit and sermonize on the evil that rich people do to the environment for the love of money. The speech is so heavy-handed it would make Jane Fonda squirm, and it somehow never mentions the pollution wealthy Steven Seagal has dumped in our theaters in the form of ``Fire Down Below.''

    James Sanford

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