The Glimmer Man (1996)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1996
Running Time	87:38
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	John Gray
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Steven Seagal Keenen Ivory Wayans Bob Gunton Brian Cox Michelle Johnson
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$24.95	Music	Trevor Rabin

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French Italian Dutch Arabic Spanish Portuguese English for the Hearing Impaired Italian for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Steven Seagal is a police officer, Jack Cole, who is assigned to a serial killer investigation along with Jim Campbell (Keenen Ivory Wayans). The plot thickens, however, when it seems as if there is a professional killer out there using the same modus operandi as the serial killer. Jack Cole is very much a left-of-centre police officer. Incense, Chinese herbs and Tibetan prayer beads figure prominently in his life. Violence seems to him to not be the best solution to life's problems, but he has to resort to violence, and plenty of it, when he is put squarely into the frame for the serial killings.

    This movie is a more-or-less by the numbers buddy cop thriller, but it has a number of things going for it. Firstly, Steven Seagal's dialogue is kept to a minimum. Secondly, the opening sequence is very unusual, and very much makes you sit up and take notice. Thirdly, the violence is kept to a maximum, even though the repeated martial arts battles tended to get a little tedious. Fortunately, the exquisitely violent gun battles compensated for this amply. Finally, the volume of the special effects and the intensity of the on-screen images are kept to a maximum. The surround sound design in particular for this movie is exceptional.

Video

    The image is quite sharp and clear, only falling slightly short of the very best transfers in quality. It is quite dark for the first half of the movie, but then seems to gradually lighten up a bit. Shadow detail was excellent, and there was no low level noise.

    The colours were highly saturated throughout, especially early on in the movie, almost to the verge of oversaturation. As with the brightness and contrast of the picture, this seemed to improve towards the latter half of the movie.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of very minor aliasing, but nothing significant. Film artefacts were present more often than I would have expected, particularly early on in the film when a number of quite large and noticeable artefacts flashed past.

Audio

    Dialogue had a processed quality about it, and was difficult to understand at times. This was a problem early in the movie, and then once again late in the movie.

    Audio sync was never definitely out, but a few lines of dialogue looked badly ADR dubbed.

    The soundtrack was scored by Trevor Rabin and it varies markedly from typical action movie set pieces to some quite unusual and suitable scoring, most notably during the excellent opening titles.

    The surround channels were very aggressively used for the special effects, with lots of action in the rears for explosions, gun shots and the like. The overall level of the surrounds was very pleasing, and sounded very full when they were being used. The net result of this is a very enveloping sound mix that really draws you into the action sequences. I would have to describe these action sequences as some of the best sound design I have heard to date.

    The .1 channel was very heavily used during the special effects sequences. Most importantly, though, it never drew attention to itself since it was nicely integrated into the overall sound mix.

Menu

• Pan & Scan version
• Theatrical Trailer
• Production Notes
• Cast Biographies

    The video quality is quite good, though it does tend to look a little oversaturated at times.

    The audio quality is excellent except for some hard to hear dialogue. This is more than made up for by the very aggressive sound design during the action sequences, however.

    The extras are non-existent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall