Into the Sun (2005) - Seagal's career implodes in Tokyo-set turkey

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Clad in an almost foot-long, black leather coat, star Steven Seagal walks away from a fiery inferno on this poster for mink's Into the Sun

Travis Hunter is a former CIA agent with intimate knowledge of Japan, who gets busy when Tokyo's governor is murdered in muddled waters between the Japanese yakuza and Chinese triad gangsters.

Into the Sun is written by Joe Halpin (Dark Blue (2010, TV-series)), Trevor Miller (Riot on Redchurch Street (2012)) and co-writer/co-producer/star Steven Seagal (Absolution (2015)) and directed by mink (Full Clip (2004)).

Among the worst of Seagal's features, Into the Sun is involuntarily funny in its best moments but more often insufferably dumb and boring. Despite a not inconsiderable budget, the film is poorly produced and looks like an ugly TV movie. 

Most will give up fast, when it comes to making any sense of the demonstratively insipid material, - one line has Seagal's Hunter threatening to kill a bully again, if he dies! - and in the obligatory romantic side story, Seagal proposes to his Japanese girlfriend in a cherry tree garden, who weepingly accepts. And this marks the film's romantic highlight, a romance, by the way, in which he speaks English, while she speaks Japanese. Later swords and blood splattering is introduced.

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 16 mil. $

Box office: In excess of 175k $ (2/4 markets)

= Box office disaster (projected return of 0.01 times its cost)

[Into the Sun was released 20 May (South Korea) and runs 96 minutes. Shooting took place from March - May 2004 in Bangkok, Thailand and Tokyo, Japan. The film's North American release was canceled and the film was instead released straight-to-DVD in all markets except for 4: South Korea, Italy, Japan and Egypt. It made 164k $ in Japan and 10k $ in Egypt. A projected total gross of 290k $ would rank the film a box office disaster. mink returned only with a video and a TV-series credit, never again directing a feature. Seagal returned in 9 video titles prior to his theatrical return in the role of 'Cock Puncher' in The Onion Movie (2008). 8.2k+ IMDb users have given Into the Sun a 4.3/10 average rating.]

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