to watch a steven seagal film , one must fully suspend all disbelief . and to fully enjoy the audacity of seagal , one must ignore all of the consequences associated with the following : starting fistfights with large men in flashy nightclubs , destroying everything in sight along the way . surviving every semi-automatic gun battle and car crash without a scratch . purchasing italian racing cars with bundles of $100 bills stuffed in a gym bag . actually being able to cash out stock options from a dot-com and then creating a private surveillance unit devoted to uncovering a ring of corrupt detroit cops involved in smuggling heroin inside of sweatshop-produced t-shirts . ok . . . maybe that corrupt cops thing is a bit hard to swallow . i remember a time when i used to enjoy seagal . such films as above the law , hard to kill , marked for death , under siege , and out for justice are all solid action films from the '90s . under siege is even kind of good . but lately , films like under siege 2 , fire down below , and the patriot have shown the age of the italian stallion of aikido . now , exit wounds stands as seagal's biggest failure , a pitiful reminder of the death of the american action film . by overextending the violence , the ludicrousness , and the sheer improbability of everything , exit wounds plays out like a circus of the damned with tom arnold working the tilt-a-whirl . ( speaking of tom arnold , it's always a bad sign when his thespian attempts at comedy are the most memorable parts of a film . ) exit wounds is bad -- really , really bad . should you care about the plot , the mighty steven plays orin boyd , a burned out cop without his trademark pony-nub who gets reassigned to a tough detroit precinct after saving the vice-president's life during a michigan militia terrorist act . apparently , this particular precinct is filled with police officers who use the gym way too much , use stun guns in strange naked homoerotic bonding moments , and routinely steal heroin from police labs to fund those out-of-state fishing trips so popular among detroit city cops . then there's dmx , the hardcore rapper-turned-actor who does a better job in his music videos than in this role as a stereotypical drug dealer/club owner/martial arts master/dot-com entrepreneur . seagal and dmx team up to stop the corrupt cop ring , run by michael jai white ( spawn ) . the gratuitous violence of exit wounds would have made peckinpah cringe and reach for the stop button on the remote . in earlier seagal films , you got brief moments of violence that made the films memorable and not so gory . exit wounds overflows with carnage -- people being bloodied by fists wrapped in chains , body parts being impaled on exposed bolts and pipes , people being crushed by oncoming cars and buses . and every single car involved in a chase sequence erupts in flames , of course . the biggest shame of the film is the misuse of seagal . instead of having seagal demonstrate the prowess and speed of a 7th dan of aikido , shown off so well in his earlier films , he ends up being nothing more than a patsy , used to connect the dots of all the inane plot points in what stands as a truly rotten film . 
