Above the Law

As in his previous film, Davis gets mileage out of supporting players who do not look or sound like professional actors and so add a level of realism to the action. Read full review

Above the Law is action trash. But it's great action trash, running fast and furious from the first frame to the last. It's entirely possible - in fact, advisable - to forget the movie's right-to-left-wing political swings and just watch Seagal rage. [22 Apr 1988, p.7]

The movie has the same problem as Davis' Chuck Norris vehicle, Code of Silence. Starting in the semi-realistic framework of the '70s cop movies, it veers off into '80s action movie cloud-cuckoo land: the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the average Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. [08 Apr 1988, p.14]

He's the anticop, one blood-soaked, quasi-psychotic symptom of Hollywood's desire to outgun, outkill and out-carchase itself. Read full review

Davis' direction is Miami Vice-tight, though with frequent attempts at humour: this, together with the caricature psycho-baddie (Silva), and the mixture of spectacular, bone-crunchingly realistic violence with a stab at topical socio-political commentary, makes for a very uncertain tone. Read full review

A slam-bang action film with some stunning scenes of mayhem and violence. Read full review

With a couple dozen stunt persons and an earthy, warm and supportive partner (Pam Grier), Seagal kicks, kills and crushes with his skillful hands one handful after another of street hoods who try and thwart his mission. Read full review

The action sequences are sleek and strong enough, but the story that chains them together is too ambitious for its own good Read full review

Interesting. Not worth the trouble, but interesting. [22 Apr 1988, p.C5]

Woefully short on originality, intelligibility and anything resembling taste. But none of this comes as a surprise. What is surprising is how little invention or energy there is in the movie's action sequences. Read full review

Come the end of the year, Above the Law may well rank among the top three or four goofiest bad movies of 1988. Read full review

Above The Law is beneath contempt, a movie whose esthetic politics stand somewhere to the right of tyrannosaurus rex. You know the type. Take your standard-issue Vietnam vet, martial-arts-mastering, renegade cop and turn him loose on the mean streets of any photogenic city (Chicago and its El, in this neon-and-sleaze case). [26 Apr 1988]