The Keeper is a reasonably recent (2009) Steven Seagal effort which has some good points... and some not so good points.
Starting with the positive, and with the main concern of many Seagal fans about his more recent efforts, he does at least do pretty much all his own fighting and isn't dubbed/body doubled all over the place like in some of his movies. He may still be heavy on the pounds but his fighting skills are not so diminished as some like to make out. Also on the plus side you can add in a few decent gunfights so I guess some of those fans will be happy with The Keeper as that's all they're loookign for... but to me it was far from sufficient with the rest of the film being such a mess.
This film comes in two parts; in the first part he gets betrayed, shot, left for dead and then goes on to do the big "recovery from his injuries/regaining his fighting skill' scenes, all of which will sound very familiar to long term fans from his early film "Hard to Kill" made when his star was rising back in 1998.
As this recovery completes, the second part of the film begins and, after a phone call he heads down to Texas to help out an old friend by bodyguarding his daughter after a failed kidnap attempt. From this point on there is not a single reference back, or need for, the set up of the first part of the film except he is on painkillers which it seems he can't give up.
BTW it should be noted that the description of the plot on the UK DVD cover for this second part of the film seems to be (I'd guess) from an early draft which has it set in Romania (not Texas) and with a different 'bad guy', a different job for the daughter's boyfriend, a different family name for the father - in fact pretty much only the daughter's name (Nikita) remains from this old plot! As an aside, talking of names, Seagal's character's surname name changes halfway through the movie in a huge continuity gaffe... and I wish they hadn't named the girl's boyfriend Mason as that was Seagal's character in "Hard to Kill" as mentioned above.
The rest is essentially straightforward bodyguard duty, fight, shoot, casually give up pills from first part of film in 'meaningful "I'm back" gesture', have daughter develop totally inappropriate and unbelievable crush on Seagal, final confrontation buildup, shootout, big final fight (with a henchman that just hasn't made enough impact previously to make it meaningful enough for a finalé, even if the action was pretty good), recover daughter from bad guys evil clutches, happy ending... with the only 'twist' being that there isn't even any attempt made at a twist and very little acting skill on display.
In fact it's so straightforward and lightweight that one might hypothesise they realised it would under run by a good 15 minutes so just attached a re-hash of the "Hard to Kill" opening to pad out the length of the film to 90 odd minutes...
So overall, if all you want is Steve doing his own stunts, a few decent shootouts and some violent hand-to-hand encounters then feel free to pick up The Keeper - it will be cheap, after all. However, if you want a semi-decent, consistent plot and acting to hang those set pieces on then look elsewhere because there are some of his recent releases in which, even if they're not as good as those made in his early hey-day when it looked very much like he could be the next 'big action star', he manages to combine all these elements to a much better degree than here.
The DVD (UK - Region 2):
The picture is 1.85:1 anamorphic; acceptable but far from anything special (it is available on Blu-Ray though I can't comment on any improvement) and the sound is a 5.1 Dolby effort, though I didn't have a 5.1 system to test the disc on so can't comment on the use of the surround. There are no subtitles (but luckily Seagal doesn't do much of his infamous mumbling in this one!)
If subtitles are a deal-breaker for you (and you have Multi-Region machine) they are apparetly present on the Region 1 US release.
The only extra is a trailer for the movie itself.
Still for a straight to DVD release which is available for about the price of a pint of larger in an hotel bar you can't really complain too much!
The DVD (UK - Region 2):
The picture is 1.85:1 anamorphic; acceptable but far from anything special (it is available on Blu-Ray though I can't comment on any improvement) and the sound is a 5.1 Dolby effort, though I didn't have a 5.1 system to test the disc on so can't comment on the use of the surround. There are no subtitles (but luckily Seagal doesn't do much of his infamous mumbling in this one!)
If subtitles are a deal-breaker for you (and you have Multi-Region machine) they are apparetly present on the Region 1 US release.
The only extra is a trailer for the movie itself.
Still for a straight to DVD release which is available for about the price of a pint of larger in an hotel bar you can't really complain too much!
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