Leung Po-Chi worked as a director in Hong Kong for about fifteen years, beginning from the mid-1970's. While some of his pictures, particularly 1984's Hong Kong 1941, which was an early hit in Chow Yun-Fat's filmography, showed promise and are fine movies in their own right, Leung's career in Hong Kong never really took off.

So, in the early 1990's, Leung headed back to his native England, where, after producing the well-regarded handover documentary Riding the Tiger, his career shifted to television series and straight to video efforts featuring action stars past their prime, such as Wesley Snipes, and, in this case, the rotund one, Steven Seagal.

Though one of the most bankable action stars of the late 1980's and early 1990's, Seagal's career has hit a wall over the past decade, with the vast majority of his new releases either headed straight to the DVD bargain bin or late-night basic cable slots. Most of these later-period Seagal films, as you might expect, really aren't that good, desperately banking on low-rent European producers and cheap location shooting to even get completed, much less produce compelling and exciting action fare.

Not surprisingly, Seagal reflects this lackadaisical attitude towards film-making in his performance. He was never a dynamic actor by any means, but he looks positively comatose here, to the point where roughly half of his lines are overdubbed by someone that doesn't even sound like him.

If you're finding this review lacking in actual specifics about Out of Reach, it's really because there isn't much to talk about. Seagal plays some sort of former operative for an unnamed agency who travels to Poland to rescue an orphaned girl who has been sold into a white slavery ring. After moping around for about eighty minutes, Seagal shoots up the bad guys, has a sword fight with their leader, adopts the kid, and then wanders around the forest looking for injured animals to save.

Out of Reach is the sort of movie that comes on at 3 AM on USA or TNT and would seem prime material for insomniac viewing, but you'll still find yourself turning the channel to a Shamwow infomercial, because watching a crazy guy named Vince screaming about a super-absorbent shammy is infinitely more entertaining than sitting all the way through this dreck.

RATING: 3