Hearing that anyone wanted to see Steven Seagal in Predator 2 in the place of Danny Glover is like hearing that someone wanted an A-list actor to star in Sharknado, it just doesn’t make sense. Does anyone realize that Seagal plays the same role in all of his movies, the guy that can take down pretty much anyone and never gets hurt? Even Jason Statham takes his licks now and then, but whatever damage Seagal takes, it’s not often and it’s rarely been able to put his character down for the count for any length of time. It’s happened, that’s not the debate, but in a lot of movies Seagal is usually up against people that don’t have the same skill set as his character, and this means that he puts them down without much of a challenge. When he takes down two hefty guys in a club fight in Exit Wounds that should have been able to fold him in half, it becomes a little less believable and a lot more worthy of a headshake and an eye roll. Seagal is for better or worse kind of a joke when it comes to action movies, I said it and plays roughly the same character all the time. The director of Predator 2 even had this to say as per MovieWeb:
“[Steven Seagal] was on board, and I had to go have a meeting with him at his house, which was one of the craziest afternoons I’ve had, sort of to talk him out of doing it. It was a bizarre — he’s a very unusual, slightly twisted kind of guy, and in the end I couldn’t see myself doing it with him. It didn’t feel right. He wasn’t the kind of hero… I thought it would just turn into a cheesy — you know, it’s got plenty of cheese now, but it’s a kind of cool cheese, I think, as opposed to uncool cheese.”
You can almost guess what Seagal wanted to do when it came to his character. He likely would have wanted to go in tossing people all over the place and might have even wanted his character to be strong and skilled enough to toss the predator around like a common thug. The director was right, there was plenty of cheese in the movie already, but that ‘cool cheese’ feeling would have been spoiled pretty quickly had we been subjected to Seagal tossing a seven to eight-foot-tall alien around like he weighed nothing at all. Plus, it’s like that if a big guy like Danny Glover had an issue with this creature then Seagal would have been broken in half the first time he went for a hip toss or to grab a talon, or anything for that matter. But maybe he wanted to get into a sword fight with the creature, which still wouldn’t work since the predator hasn’t been known to fight fairly since the first movie. Even thinking of Seagal trying to take on the predator is hilarious since it would have killed a lot of interest in the Predator movies, which has been happening gradually anyway. But Seagal would have sped that process up by a few decades since watching him take on an alien with his same tough-guy persona would have been ridiculous.
Like a lot of people, I’ve watched a good number of Steven Seagal movies and I’ve enjoyed the action scenes because the guy appears to be invincible a lot of the time and can only be damaged on the rare occasion when it would appear that his opponent is that skilled or somehow gets the drop on him. Barring all the wild claims he’s made about his life, being a top action star is one of them that was true enough at one point but has faded in a big way over the years since people have caught on to the fact that he almost never breaks character and always tends to play the same kind of character that’s awesome at martial arts, or at least the style that he’s had for so long, and he’s soft-spoken and very spiritual in some roles. But he’s the guy that doesn’t want to fight until there’s no other choice, at which time he’ll use as little movement as he can in order to decimate his opponents, no matter how many of them there are. In reality, a skilled opponent, and definitely a group of opponents, would bring him down without much effort since he’s not his movie persona, no matter how much he wants to claim otherwise. For quite a few years a lot of people have been under the impression that Seagal is a genuine tough guy, but with the number of fights that he’s pulled out of simply because those he ‘challenged’ wouldn’t meet him at a place well away from cameras and witnesses it’s not hard to see why he’s kind of a running joke.
There’s also a reason why seeing him in a Predator movie would have been less than appealing, since unless he was getting his butt handed to him constantly, it would have been one of the biggest sci-fi spoofs of all time.
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