The greatest movie ever made..!

Perfect cast and a good story

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Sometimes I like to torture myself with a terrible film, but this came close to the limit for me.The premise of the biological warfare data is fairly standard, and who would've expected that the good guy's daughter would be kidnapped. It's all standard bad, but the whole attitude of Segal is terrible.So, someone's kidnapped his daughter, and over the course of the film he has three opportunities to get her back pretty easily, and just wanders away from each one of them without seeming to care much.He's in a high speed car chase trying to get her back. He's knocked out the other cars chasing him, and there is the cab ahead of them. The other agent in the car says 'Let's go to the safe house'. 'OK' he says, and drives off, abandoning the pursuit.Secondly, when he's in the police station, and the woman he knows had kidnapped the kid walks in, he just sits there and lets her walk out. He only overpowers the cops when they tell him they're not going to let him go.Finally, when he finally teams up with the woman (surprise!), they could go collect his daughter from her friend, but instead they go to the safe house again, in the same city, and spend the night there. They could easily have driven to where she was, but nope, safe house.The whole film is about a deadly agent mildly interested in rescuing his daughter.

Not bad at all. I came into this with low expectations, but Steven never seems to let me down. The first and last scenes of the movie where he is interacting with his daughter are comical. He just doesn't know how to act around children and it shows. This deals with his daughter getting kidnapped, biological weapons of terror, and some Romanian gangs with police corruption aka a true Seagal story line. The man literally blows apart a watermelon INTERNALLY with his super move, which is foreshadowing at its finest. He is so badass in this movie, he shoots down a helicopter with a pistol and it explodes as if an atomic bomb went off! He even gets locked in a room and has to make his own shotgun out of metal pipes he rips out of walls, all MacGuyverish. He also makes household objects into bombs and more. There is a major love interest in this film. You can't tell if they love or hate each other most of the time. But you know that no lady can resist that ponytail. The ending is weird. It has a climax and then introduces the real bad guy type thing but it is already past the climax. I mean they I see what they went for but it is contrived. Then he is sitting at a picnic with his daughter and he's all, give that apple to that horse, and then cut to cheesy smiling still shot of Steven and end transmission. It is ludicrous, but oh so Steven. I am sure he wrote that scene himself. All in all, pretty good Seagal flick that you need to watch.

I admit it, I am not a Steven Seagal fan or of his films, but I do keep watching them for curiosity. As far as they do, Shadow Man is pretty bad, but it does start off quite promisingly and it for me is not as bad as Out for a Kill, which is a serious contender for Seagal's worst film ever. Plus there are some striking locations. However, the camera-work is very slapdash a vast majority of the time, and the direction is pretty incompetent. The story is messy and predictable, the action is barely risible with some poor doubles, the film is dreadfully scripted and the pacing is sluggish. Sadly the acting doesn't fare much better, fine actress Imelda Staunton especially deserves much better than this but she tries hard with an underwritten role. Seagal is part of the problem, I actually consider him a poor actor overall, and this is no exception. Here, he looks very tired and unkempt and he seems to be going through the motions. Overall, marginally better than I thought, but that is faint praise. 3/10 Bethany Cox

Fortune 500 businessman(!)and former CIA operative, Jack Foster(Steven Seagal)arrives in Bucharest, Romania, for a vacation with his daughter(..his wife, her mother was born there and this trip was to mark the fifth anniversary of her death visiting the place of her conception)only to have her kidnapped by a taxi driver, Anya(Eva Pope)after a bomb explosion supposedly killed George(Michael Elwyn; Foster's father-in-law, himself a former CIA agent). What Jack didn't know was that George had stolen a micro chip containing the formula for a virus to be used as a bio weapon, slipping it in a pen of his. George would sell it to the highest bidder, having Jack carry the micro chip as an involuntary courier. So Jack, with both a crooked politia, FSB(..a new branch of the KGB)and a member of the US Embassy, Waters(Garrick Hagon)and his goons desiring to get the micro chip, will be on the run, while also pursuing the location of his daughter, soon, in fact, joining forces with Anya(..who actually momentarily saved Amanda, his daughter, from being captured by Waters as planned)to evade and eliminate those that threaten his daughter's well being. Essentially shot in the Peter Greengrass method(Bourne Supremacy;Bourne Ultimatum) that has become popular in lower budgeted action flicks concerning a hero on the lam, equipped with superior skills, always one step ahead of the enemy, moving through a European location, this time Bucharest(..probably because it's simply cheaper to shoot in this city which favors Russia and Checkoslovakia)...the camera constantly moving, characters shot in and out of frame, with rarely any composed shots lasting longer than seconds giving editor Andy Horvitch plenty of work to do.Interesting to see Imelda Staunton in such a film as this, made for DVD action fare, as Cochran, Ambassador of the US Embassy, who will not tolerate her own people causing mischief, or allowing a dangerous micro chip loose in Bucharest. Jack, who simply wants his daughter back, will use all his fighting skills(..and other techniques, such as a gnarly bomb he sets up to escape being trapped by mercenaries)in order to secure Amanda(Skye Bennett) to safety. Vincent Riotta has a supporting role as Harry, a former partner of Jack's, who sets him up, hoping his guys get the micro chip. Plot-wise, this is one of Seagal's more ambitious films, allowing his Jack to move about in the Bourne tradition. Seagal is pretty much Bourne, just a little less athletic, seeking after a daughter, her safety and security what drives him to obliterate anyone that stands in his way. As we are accustomed to, Seagal uses both his swift martial arts skills(..his hands and the power that derives from their speed)and a hand gun when needed to successfully remove those that interfere with his determined goal. As expected, there is a car chase as Jack, with Harry in tow, is pursuing Anya(..who had just lifted Amanda from the street before Waters' men could nab her)through Bucharest.