Plan to skip Seagal's 'Exit Wounds' unless you enjoy trash talk, hokey fight scenes, lame characters

If you spend your nights soaking up the latest "world class wrestling" fare, then "Exit Wounds" is the movie for you.

It's jammed with trash talk, cheesy fight scenes and characters as muscle bound in their heads as they are in their bodies.

For everyone else, the best thing that can be said about "Exit Wounds" is that it contains some pretty spectacular chase scenes, the carnage of which must have consumed most of the film's budget.

Steven Seagal, absent since his 1997 "Fire Down Below" release, stars as a Detroit cop, whose character is cut from familiar "Serpico"-like cloth.

His over-the-board pursuit of justice has irritated one too many of his superiors and he's been demoted to a beat cop, forced even to attend anger-management courses, a vehicle for some of the film's off-color humor.

The action star has shed his patented ponytail, and his jowls reveal the pudding diet of an over-the-hill machismo type.

But director Andrzej Bartkowiak has surrounded Seagal with a large group of younger actors -- rapper DMX, Isaiah Washington, Anthony Anderson, among others -- to attract a youth-oriented audience. In fact, the script includes so many cookie-cutter faces it's hard to keep them straight.

The story -- a good-cop-bad-cop yarn about the drug trade -- holds few surprises, but it's wrapped in slick, blue-steel production values, hot cars and trucks, and a death scene or two that will make you gasp.

Tom Arnold appears as the host of a Detroit television show that specializes in -- yep, you guessed it -- typical reality in-your-face programming.

Unless you have nothing else to do with your time, wait for "Exit Wounds" to hit the video shelves. It's worth a look when the wrestlers have retired for the evening and the boob tube has switched to infomercials.