Awfully Good Movies: The Glimmer Man

July 9th 2020, 9:40am

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

The Glimmer Man (1996)

DIRECTOR: John Gray CAST: Steven Seagal, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Bob Gunton

We're halfway through the Awfully 90s Summer, but things are just starting to heat up as we focus on an actor who started the decade as one of the biggest action stars and ended it as one of the lowest…Steven Seagal, in the title role of the buddy cop action comedy THE GLIMMER MAN!

After UNDER SIEGE became his biggest hit to date, you'd think the martial artist-turned-movie star would be going nowhere but up, but after several sexual harassment complaints, getting banned from SNL, and a big flop of a directorial debut with ON DEADLY GROUND, Steven Seagal knew it was gonna take more than an UNDER SIEGE sequel to save his stardom. So for his next Warner Bros. vehicle, Seagal played a New York City cop who gets transferred to Los Angeles to team up with a fellow detective played by Keenen Ivory Wayans, fresh off of his pioneering sketch comedy series IN LIVING COLOR and ready to get back into the movie business, as the two mismatched partners are on the trail of a psychopathic serial killer who murders families of the Catholic faith and crucifies their corpses on the walls. It's kind of like that really scary David Fincher movie where Brad Pitt found his wife's head in a box…THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, I believe.

Unfortunately, much like Kirk Cameron before him and Kanye West after him, Steven Seagal had a "spiritual awakening" related to his Buddhist faith where he decided to no longer kill people in movies, which means his character is going to have to use deductive reasoning and philosophical discussion to solve–nah, I'm just fucking with you, he slices a bunch of dudes' throats with a blade hidden in a credit card, like, 20 minutes into the movie. But even though Seagal was able to put aside his spiritual beliefs to once again shoot and stab criminal scumbags, he was not able to successfully hide his thinning hairline and chunky midsection, and not even acting alongside a Wayans brother could get Seagal to be funnier than Will Sasso's impression of him on MADtv.

Although it was nothing but direct-to-video junk and exiling himself to Russia for Seagal from this point forward, THE GLIMMER MAN still has all the junky pleasures one can expect from a 90s era buddy cop movie: explosions aplenty, angry police chiefs demanding Seagal to hand over his badge, Russian mobsters getting gunned down to death in bloody fashion, Seagal trying to awkwardly speak like his Black co-star, and a who's who of great character actors lending some support–Stephen Tobolowsky of Ned Ryerson fame, evil Shawshank warden Bob Gunton, former Rocky Balboa villain Richard Gant, and SUCCESSION patriarch Brian Cox. So while Seagal and Wayans may not have become the next Gibson and Glover or Chan and Tucker, they still happen to offer plenty of laughs…even if they are largely unintentional ones. And hey, at least Damon Wayans can rest easily knowing he did the better LETHAL WEAPON knockoff amongst his family members.