Steven Seagal to the max in latest movie

MANILA, Philippines - Steven Seagal is promoting his latest action film, Maximum Conviction, where he stars along with Stone Cold’s Steve Austin as ex-Black Ops agents defending a secret government prison from a small army of mercenaries, led by Michael Pare, trying to extract one of the inmates against their will. Maximum Conviction is one of Seagal’s more action-packed films in recent years.

You haven’t done too many team-ups with other action stars before Maximum Conviction. How did this come together?

“Well, somebody said to just take a look at this script and this story, and I liked it. They said Steve (Austin) wants to do it, and I met him and liked him, and thought that we could be a good kind of team together. That’s sort of how it turned out. We had good chemistry together, and I thought it worked out great.”

Had other opportunities to work in similar projects came before this?

“You know, they did offer me Expendables and stuff like this. I’m sure that there have been offers in the past, and some I would make and some I wouldn’t make.”

In this film, your character doesn’t put a lot of faith in the government, and that seems to be a recurring theme in a lot of your movies. Is that an issue for you?

“I have faith in the military, you know, I have faith in special forces, I have faith in our police departments, but it depends on… You say, ‘the government.’ It depends on what the regime is, who’s in power at the time.”

You’ve done so many action movies of so many different stripes. Do you have any favorite action sequences from any of your films?

“Gosh, it’s probably a few. I did like the action in Marked for Death, some of the sequences in that. Then in Out for Justice, the bar scene. Those are the scenes that pop to mind right now.”

What makes a good action sequence in your eyes?

“Well, to me it’s something that’s realistic, that is not contrived and something that people haven’t seen over and over again.”

(Maximum Conviction opens nationwide today, released and distributed by CrystalSky Multimedia.)