Guest
Have you seen this movie? Describe your opinion and movie title. You hear the names “Mike Tyson” and “Steven Seagal” and it is easy to envision the two squaring off in a killer fight scene. The greatest boxer of his generation versus the man who brought aikido to Hollywood? That is a classic confrontation. Or rather it surely would have been if Tyson and Seagal had made a movie together in, say, 1991. Sadly, it is 2018. If time is an illusion, it is a brutal, unfeeling one. Tyson and Seagal square off in China Salesman, which was released in China last year and received a small release in the U.S. earlier this summer. I would have an easier time describing the properties of advanced nuclear physics than I would summarizing the film’s plot, so briefly: It involves a corporate battle over cell phone rights in Africa. (The title character is an engineer at the center of the whole kerfuffle.) That’s about all I got, to be honest; the story is shockingly difficult to follow. Tyson and Seagal play side characters in that struggle. In an early scene, someone serves Tyson’s character — who insists he doesn’t drink — a glass of urine. Naturally, that leads to a brawl. At least the first part of it isn’t terrible, with Tyson showing off his punching power against a bunch of goons and at least one very large barrel:  This titanic struggle concludes with Tyson getting the upper hand — and by titanic I mean like the boat; the whole thing ends in tragic, awful disaster, with more very obvious doubling and some very strange line readings. Tyson screams at Seagal “You serve me pee, you die!” And then, after another couple punches, “Mother f—er, you drink piss!” If Mike Tyson actually tried to serve Steven Seagal human urine, we’ll never know; the movie immediately cuts away to another spine-tingling scene of corporate intrigue. If you wish to know what happens next, you can watch the film on Netflix. I wish I could say the rest of the movie was better than this, but it is not.
