DVD REVIEW: Street Wars, (15), (92 mins), new on DVD.

And then they pause momentarily, just to give him the chance variously to thump or shoot them.

More damaging to the film, though, is the fact that Seagal is just such a numbingly one-dimensional actor. In his hands, Elijah Kane is somewhat less than sparklingly alive.

But Street Wars still offers a reasonable range of pleasures, not least because the producers have had the good sense to give PC Kane a couple of glamorous assistants who pull off most of the action stuff with some panache.

The gist is that Seagal leads an undercover team of Seattle-based cops who target major criminals in the North Western territory, taking them down with their own unique brand of brutal street justice.

Which basically means that there is an awful lot of dull posturing with nasty-looking guns as Kane and his gang stalk in the shadows before coming out all arms blazing.

With Street Wars comes a lot of incomprehensible street talk. Teenagers are dropping dead at raves after supping on “bad dope peppered with hot loads”. Kane’s task is to unravel the trail of corruption - one that menacingly leads him right back into the heart of the law enforcement agencies.

The dialogue is crummy (“Won’t these kids ever learn?”, intones a dishy policewoman as she towers over the latest under-age corpse); and Seagal himself does his best to snuff out all life with his laughable woodenness.

But you can’t help being drawn into it all just a bit by Keoni Waxman’s pacy direction and a few neat sequences - a degree of compensation for all the film’s other failings.

Phil Hewitt