Steven Seagal has spent the last few years on A&E’s Lawman as a fake cop doing real cop things, such as dedicating himself to stopping illegal immigration no matter how many puppies he has to slaughter. But now he’s back in more familiar territory, playing a fake cop doing fake cop things for ReelzChannel, the basic cable network that previously toyed with the fabric of reality by airing The Kennedys, and which is now getting into the original programming game fo' reeeeelz with True Justice.
Obviously, “original” is being sort of liberally applied here, in several ways. For one thing, upon hearing that title, we were pretty certain that True Justice already had its straight-to-video debut in, say, 2002, and maybe it featured Seagal playing a disgraced former cop investigating his framing in a murder he didn’t commit while romancing, say, Paula Patton. In fact, we had to check IMDb to confirm that we were just imagining all of that. For another, True Justice actually premiered earlier this year in Spain and the UK and is widely available on DVD overseas. And, of course, it stars Steven Seagal as “Elijah Kane,” the leader of a group of “hardcore undercover cops” battling drug lords, gangs, crime syndicates, and other things that might require kicking in the face in the streets of Seattle, which seems like little more than a change of venue and vaguely badass name. But hey, whatever keeps Seagal off the real streets.