"How many of you have heard of alternative engines? Engines that can run on anything from alcohol to water?" That's what Steven Seagal asks fans of his elbow-destroying tough-guy movies in the long and miscalculated speech that concludes On Deadly Ground. Like the anti-nuke Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Seagal's debut as a director is a vanity project made by the sheer force of an actor's Hollywood influence, fumbling as it tries to come to terms with an important issue. In this case, that issue is the destruction of pristine Alaskan wilderness by oil mogul Michael Jennings (Michael Caine), who will stop at nothing to build a huge oil rig, even though he knows it's unsafe and could explode. Naturally, Forrest Taft (Seagal) sets out to stop him -- by blowing it up. That's typical of the logic in the movie, which wastes the great Caine as a villain so cartoonish -- posing with deer for commercials while his henchmen murder kindly whistleblowers -- that his role trivializes the concept of corporate misdoing. Seagal won a Razzie for Worst Director, partly for the film's poor pacing -- it halts in scenes where Forrest experiences spiritual visions resembling a hair metal video. Like his environmental pleas, the character's mystic posturing proves meaningless. Though he hypnotizes others with koans like "What is the essence of a man?" Forrest ultimately disregards Eastern meditation in favor of brutally maiming and burning corporate officers. There's a fine line between righteous action movie violence and unpleasant, sadistic killing, and in this film Seagal goes farther across it than ever. But this isn't to imply that Forrest is an antihero; as in every Seagal flick, the character and the actor are hard to distinguish, and the movie is mostly concerned with how great he is.