Ticker - SeagalFest Pt.II (The Wrap-up)

Matthew Goltz
2 April 2003

Ticker is the story of San Francisco cop-on-the-edge, Ray Nettles (Tom Sizemore). Bitter and burnt-out after the slow-motion murder of his wife and child, he's on the trail of a faction of inconsistently-accented Irish Bombers, led by Alec Swan (Dennis Hopper) who's motives are never really made clear. When Nettles joins forces with SFPD bomb squad leader, Glass (Seagal), wackiness ensues, bombs detonate and a new buddy-film partnership is born.

Yes, the film treads the same ground as Blown Away, Speed and a dozen other police thrillers. The thing about Ticker is this: while it's not a great film by any standard, it's not-great in an interesting way, and does feature unexpected and unlikely entertainment value in its underplayed star performances and low-budget aesthetic. It's far more dumb fun than Seagal's big-budget follow up Half Past Dead and the straight-to-video The Foreigner (though that movie has an amazingly overblown and hilarious scene where Seagal escapes a killer by using a small box bomb to destroy an entire train station).

Granted, if this movie starred your average nobodies it wouldn't work at all. They're given some pretty underdeveloped - - and often unintentionally funny - - dialogue. Somehow though, against all odds, Sizemore, Hopper, Peter Greene, Joe Spano, Jaime Pressley and yes, even Seagal himself make it all palatable and, in a weird way, even charming.

The DVD commentary track informs us that actors sharing a scene were often filmed days apart and in different locations, linked together with cross-cutting and even green screen projection. Producer Paul Rosenblum and director Albert Pyun give us more info on the nature of Ticker and direct-to-video features; the movie was shot in 12 days, uses a five-minute montage of stock footage for the opening scene and even sports a sequence where Sizemore and Seagal face down a baddie at a bar...where, in the background in a fake beard, is Seagal himself, singing and playing on stage! (And hey, Mr. Pyun... How about making a film about that character? "Seagal as a blues-musician/former-black-ops guy?" I'd be first in line.)

Other laughable-yet-likable moments include...

• Sizemore's doomed partner Fuzzy (Nas, who isn't very fuzzy at all, really) lectures Ray about "the demons inside him" and how they're "going to make him explode." Later, dying from a gunshot wound, he chokingly intones...

  "Ray...(coughs) Ray, those demons inside you (coughs more)... Let 'em go, Ray...before it's too late."

  Unnatural dialogue is always hard to pull off, especially when one's bullet-ridden character is consumed with his friend's personal demons and not saying anything more natural or personally relevant like, say, "JESUS!! F---ING SH-T, THIS HURTS!!"

• The attempts by the filmmakers to make the fun-but-bulky Seagal look graceful in his running-around scenes by playing them in slow motion, actually pioneering it for B-movie filmmakers to come.

• Seagal hardly has any fights or action scenes until the very end of the movie; he's "more Zen" here, remember --- though he takes down a badguy in a parked car with a dufflebag bomb by kicking the car's front bumper and setting off the steering wheel's airbag, knocking the baddie out cold.

• Hopper constantly recites the old phone company jingle, "reach out, reach out and touch someone," though he sings it in such an off-key way you'd think he'd never actually heard it before.

• Incongrous cameos by rapper Nas, TLC's Chilli and former original-gangster-and-direct-to-video-superstar Ice-T (I guess they just couldn't find a good enough mannequin).

• But best of all is the truly inspired and improvised advice that Seagal gives Sizemore on the nature of life:

  "Now listen to me, man...You're just gonna have to go beyond life and fear. Don't be attached to living or dying or anything else. And understand that death is just another stage...on the playground. You have to be able to feel it, and the way to be able to learn how to feel is by coming to know the nature of your mind. And even if you do go today, you'll be back. So, if you're not attached to living or dying you have nothing to fear."
  
  How the concept of fear relates to "death on the playground" is beyond me. Later as they walk off into the night, Seagal tells Sizemore, in regards to the memories of his fallen family...
  
  "Go ahead man, talk to 'em. They'll listen... Love never dies...and neither do they. Love is eternal...and that's a long time."
  
  A decent message, sure. And hearing these words, knowing how scenes like these are filmed (many are dubbed in ADR and layed over film of obvious stand-ins for the stars) makes them more fun than they probably have a right to be.

Yet, the deep wisdom of Steven Seagal and the mad-dog intensity of Tom Sizemore make Ticker a cut above the rest of the post-'92 Seagal oeuvre. The two actors couldn't be further apart in their methods and acting styles, yet somehow they form an unusually deep partnership here. They're very father-and-son-like, never more than when Seagal teaches Sizemore how to fix his own broken wristwatch and says, "if I baby you, tell you how to do it, it'll be in one ear and out the other."

Now, that kind of scene would feel out of place even if shared by Riggs and Murtaugh in a Lethal Weapon movie. Yet, the fact that they actually pull it off here with a modicum of dignity speaks volumes for Ticker, a low-budget actioner in which less actually does mean more, for a change.

--MG 4/02/03