Before Above the Law, Steven Seagal was better known for running an aikido dojo in West Hollywood than for anything he had done on a movie screen. CAA chief Michael Ovitz saw a possible action star, convinced Warner Bros. to give him a look, and the studio spent a reported $50,000 on a screen test directed by Andrew Davis. Warner liked the results enough to approve a $7.5 million feature. Some executives even imagined Seagal as a successor to Clint Eastwood. The movie earned roughly $18.9 million domestically, and an unlikely leading-man career was underway.

Davis brought production to his hometown of Chicago, where Nico Toscani (Seagal, Under Siege) works as a detective whose past with the CIA still has a way of finding him. A prologue in Vietnam establishes why he walked away after witnessing agent Kurt Zagon (Henry Silva, The Manchurian Candidate) cross a line Nico couldn’t accept. Back home, Nico works alongside Delores “Jacks” Jackson (Pam Grier, Jackie Brown) and returns to his wife, Sara (Sharon Stone, Basic Instinct). Then a drug bust begins pointing toward the men he thought he had left behind, and the case becomes more dangerous than the usual street-level cleanup.

Seagal helped develop the story, produced, and staged his own fights, making the film an unusually prominent early Hollywood showcase for aikido. The action has a nasty efficiency: wrists get twisted, bodies sail across rooms, and furniture rarely survives the encounter. Silva reportedly broke Seagal’s nose during their climactic fight, but the star returned to work. Davis, who had already explored Chicago’s streets with Chuck Norris in Code of Silence, gives the city a personality beyond establishing shots, and an uncredited John C. Reilly makes his film debut during the bar brawl.

Seagal’s acting is considerably less flexible than his fighting, and the CIA conspiracy isn’t breaking any new ground. Still, there’s a tough, scrappy energy here that his increasingly mechanical later vehicles struggled to recapture. Nico’s backstory even borrows from the intelligence connections Seagal claimed for himself, claims that were never independently established. The ponytail arrived fully formed, and so did the elbow strikes. It’s easy to see why fans still place this alongside Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, and Under Siege when discussing his best work.