Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #196 Exit Wounds (2001)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

I’ve been writing about the films of Tom Arnold for another kind patron who correctly figured that now would be the perfect time to revisit one of the loopier entries in Arnold’s dazzlingly checkered filmography, 2001’s Exit Wounds. 

Arnold is back to his scene-stealing ways in the juicy role of Henry Wayne, a rage-filled TV blowhard in the Rush Limbaugh mold who conducts undercover investigations with what he describes as the “I” team, “which is a group of former P.Is who all lost their licenses due to various felony convictions.” 

Just as The General’s Daughter made me want to see a movie based on an opening where John Travolta plays a military dick in the deep south who lives on a houseboat and speaks in the world’s thickest, fakest Southern drawl rather than the icky, dour sexually charged melodrama that followed I would much rather watch a wacky comedy about Henry Wayne’s misadventures with the I Team rather than the eminently watchable nonsense we ended up with. 

The filmmakers were so blown away by the sleaze ball energy Arnold brought to the role that they turn the movie over to him and fellow plus-sized cut-up Anthony Anderson at the very end so they can favor the audience with a solid five minutes of raunchy, profane, hard-R comic improvisation involving masturbation, sex with larger women and any number of ribald subjects.

If that seems like a strange way to conclude a Steven Seagal/DMX action movie, in no small part because it does not involve Seagal or DMX in the least, that’s because it is. Then again Exit Wounds is an alternately beguilingly and bewilderingly odd piece of pop detritus. 

Alas, Arnold is great in moderation, and his film-closing comic duet with Anderson proves entirely too much of a good thing. It’s a curiously vaudevillian conclusion to what is otherwise a macho, testosterone-fueled action movie blessed with a lot of weird personality, but not quite enough.  

Steven Seagal, who had already begun his sad, inevitable descent into direct-to-video schlock and bloated self-parody with 1998’s The Patriot is unusually engaged in the role of Detective Orin Boyd, a maverick who plays by his own rules but gets results. 

He’s so over-the-top in his blood-thirsty zeal that he borders on self-parody and there are gleeful, glorious moments throughout Exit Wounds when Seagal finds just the right note of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, like when a dazzled fellow officer asks him if it’s true that he once beat a man unconscious with his own dead cat and he responds, in a perfect deadpan, that the cat wasn’t dead.

Seagal is a figure of mockery and fun these days because he’s a right-wing crank with hair that looks like a catcher’s mitt made of Brillo pads who seems winded by the effort required to stand up and/or walk several feet but also because he is so infamously, notoriously lazy. He just doesn’t care as long as the checks clear. The bar for him has consequently been set so low that all he needs to do to clear it is seem awake, alert and mildly engaged for him to soar over it. By those standards, his performance here is a goddamn triumph. By all other standards, it’s perfectly fine.

Exit Wounds opens with Orin Boyd (Seagal) saving the life of the Vice President of the United States by disobeying orders by killing the militia-men who have taken him hostage and hurling the VP into a large body of water. 

Instead of getting a medal or commendation for, I dunno SAVING THE VICE PRESIDENT’S LIFE, he instead gets a demotion to Detroit’s toughest neighborhood and has to take anger management classes where he meets Henry Wade and makes a poor impression on his teacher by destroying his desk when he cannot figure out how to exit it and very unconvincingly asserts, “You all would be lucky to be as happy as I am!” 

Being a tough but honest cop, Orin can’t help but observe that the culture at his new workplace can best be described as “corrupt.” Orin can trust his partner Detective George Clark (Seagal’s fellow Republican/problematic human being Isaiah Washington) but there’s something about cool, composed, collected Sergeant Lewis Strutt (Michael Jai White) that makes him suspicious. 

That’s because the officer is the mastermind behind a plan to move heroin by transporting it in tee-shirts, a sinister scheme that gives new meaning to the phrase “heroin chic.” The future Black Dynamite icon makes for a terrific antagonist: charismatic, calculating and handy with a sword as well as his fists. 

To help him in his clandestine heroin-smuggling operation the corrupt cops seek the assistance of the mysterious Latrell Walker (DMX), an insanely wealthy figure of mystery who professes to be deep in the drug game but is clearly harboring a very big secret.  

I misremembered DMX’s character being an undercover DEA agent in Exit Wounds. I may have been mistaking it for the rapper’s own life, as DMX was once arrested and charged with impersonating an FBI agent, possibly while high on crack cocaine. 

At the time people thought that was funny, myself included. They saw DMX as a cartoon character, a caricature, a punchline. It should have been obvious then, as it is obvious now, that DMX was someone in tremendous, almost unbearable pain and we dishonor not only DMX’s memory but the lives and pain of everyone who wrestles with addiction and depression and mental illness when we treat the desperate things they do in the throes of addition as a joke and not a cry for help. 

In actuality the backstory for DMX’s hero is infinitely more ridiculous. He’s not a drug dealer or an undercover agent but rather an INTERNET MILLIONAIRE who has nobly decided to use his vast online fortune to operate an elaborate sting operation to expose police corruption. 

DMX gives a curiously muted performance here, in part because he shares most of his scenes with Anthony Anderson, who is so screamingly loud in his broadly stereotypical antics that it can be easy to forget that DMX is even in the movie. If X’s intensity hovers somewhere in the 4 to 5 area throughout, Anderson cranks it up to 13 at all times, content that this is the kind of movie where no one has to tone it down or reign it in. 

The late rapper contributed extensively to the film’s hit soundtrack, as was the tradition at the time. This leads to weird cognitive dissonance when DMX the weirdly underwhelming, low-energy actor must compete for the audience’s attention with DMX the raw, angry, undeniably compelling, high-energy rapper.

A solid hit in theaters and on home video, Exit Wounds revived Seagal’s career but it wouldn’t be long until his increasingly interchangeable vehicles would be skipping theaters altogether en route to direct-to-video burials. 

The same was true, unfortunately, of DMX. He headlined two more theatrically released films in the Silver-produced Cradle 2 the Grave and then the Donald Goines adaptation Never Die Alone. 

After that everything went direct to video, including 2019’s Beyond the Law, which re-teamed the rapper with Seagal two years before his death. I’m all sorts of intrigued by the existence of Beyond the Law but I probably won’t end up watching it or writing about it unless someone chooses it for this column. 

By the point Beyond the Law was just barely released these former giants had fallen from the great heights of their early fame and I’m morbidly curious to see just how far. 

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