Reception
The movie received mixed to negative reception.
The film cemented Seagal's status as the "Aikido action hero" due to the very esoteric, anachronistic techniques his character employs to overcome antagonists. For example "knee-walking" while in seiza (正座, literally "correct sitting") is employed to navigate a convenience store aisle without exposing the head to gunfire; this has origins in culturally-mandated etiquette, specific to pre-Meiji Japan and during some traditional arts such as the tea ceremony and Ikebana. (Robert Twigger's book Angry White Pyjamas mentions the story of a Japanese police officer, and aikido trainee, using knee-walking in a similar fashion during a gunfight.)
Read more about this topic: Hard To Kill
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (18581915)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fallthe company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (18391894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (16671745)