Seagal plays Forrest Taft, who works as a firefighter on oil rigs in Alaska. Here is a description of him, courtesy of the IMDb, as given by Stone (R. Lee Erney), who is trying to kill him:

”My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we're dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can't fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He's the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire! You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he's going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy's a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we're all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska. So let's go find him and kill him and get rid of the son of a bitch!”

Stone, as you might have guessed, is a man of few words.

Taft works for Michael Jennings (Michael Caine), a oil magnate and Villain with a capital “v.” Taft is a maverick to say the least; he stops fires by exploding them rather than typical tactics like water or flame retardant material. He is a man of limited morals until Jennings tries to kill him, at which point he is saved by Eskimos, told he is the reincarnated spirit of a bear, and then seeks to restore the environment to its rightful owners by blowing up most of it and killing anyone who tries to stop him in unbearably painful ways. Logic be damned, he is Seagal! FEAR HIM!

The kitchen sink approach to the action is what separates ON DEADLY (boring) GROUND from other Seagal egofests like UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY and THE GLIMMER MAN. Poorly edited hand-to-hand fights and some weak gun battles are to be expected, but GROUND throws in chases on horseback, endless explosions, gruesome tortures, and a vicious hand-slapping game. Yes, that’s right, Seagal isn’t satisfied to pound his enemies, he must humiliate them by playing that childhood game where you place your hands on top of someone else’s and try to get out of the way when they swing at you. Of course, when Seagal plays it, he also breaks your kidney in half as punishment for a loss.

The morals on display here are truly bizarre. The man Seagal breaks with the little slapfest has been mocking a drunken Native American; a despicable act, for sure. But is Seagal a hero for beating the tar out of him? Seagal would say yes. Jennings is evil because he refuses to return the oil to the Native Americans, so Seagal is totally in the right to destroy him and everything he has built. Sure, Jennings is destroying the environment, but isn’t destroying a huge rig and refinery just as destructive? The “If I can’t have it then no one can” mentality doesn’t really fit with Taft’s eco-friendly personality. Then again, Steven Seagal is playing a Native American killing machine of almost godlike powers, so I’m probably just overthinking here. Mostly, we’re dealing with Seagal gone unchecked, so that ethics aren’t being tested, they simply aren’t being considered. Seagal let loose on Alaska, without anyone to constrain him. This sounds a lot more dangerous than big business to me.

It bothers me that ON DEADLY GROUND ends with Seagal giving a monologue about the dangers of environmental devastation to an audience of Native American (ostensibly us watching the film). Not because it doesn’t fit the rest of the film (and it most certainly doesn’t), but because it falls to Steven Seagal to make films against ruining our environment, and Seagal’s idea for saving the environment is punching things really hard until they cry uncle. Shouldn’t more intelligent directors be doing this? It’s a shame that the only films that are allowed to have opinions are the ones that tack it on as a message to a film otherwise devoid of any sort of intelligence.

When I was 13, I couldn’t get enough of Seagal and UNDER SIEGE. It was the coolest movie I’d ever seen. The violence, the martial arts, the naked Erika Eleniak, it was some sort of witches brew for teenage boys. Watching ON DEADLY GROUND now, I feel embarrassed - this is what my enthusiasm wrought. Thankfully, the honeymoon didn’t last long; Seagal’s recent movies suggest he is now in full denial of his age, weight, and hairline. He’s also embroiled in a fascinating legal battle with a former producing partner, in which both parties have accused the other of using mob intimidation tactics to scare the other. Somewhere I can hear A.J. Benza, cigarette-tinged voice, calling off into the misty night, “Fame...ain’t it a bitch.”