Critical Response
The film bears a 0% freshness rating on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.
At the time of its release Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel included the film in their "Worst of" list for 1994, singling out the melancholy tone of the film, and the quality of Seagal's dialogue. Ebert in particular singled out the speech by Seagal's character that concluded the film, which he saw as extraneous, and an example of the film's "egotistical vanity scenes", as well as its inaccuracies.
Variety film critic Leonard Klady referred to the film as "a vanity production parading as a social statement" and commented that the film seemingly borrowed heavily from the earlier film, Billy Jack but opined that Seagal lacked "acting technique and the ability behind the camera to keep the story simple and direct" that Billy Jack star Tom Laughlin, exhibited. Like Ebert, Klady also singled out the speech by Seagal's character at the end of the film.
Read more about this topic: On Deadly Ground
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or response:
“Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Play for young children is not recreation activity,... It is not leisure-time activity nor escape activity.... Play is thinking time for young children. It is language time. Problem-solving time. It is memory time, planning time, investigating time. It is organization-of-ideas time, when the young child uses his mind and body and his social skills and all his powers in response to the stimuli he has met.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)