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:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“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 fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)