“Black Dawn” is a really bad action flick and it looks so cheap and nasty. It stars Steven Seagal (“Out For Justice”, “Fire Down Below”), who reprises his role of Jonathan Cold from “The Foreigner”. It’s only loosely connected to “The Foreigner” so you don’t need to sit through that movie to watch this one.

In “Black Dawn”, secret agent Jonathan Cold is hired to break a man out of his prison. He subsequently gets hired to authenticate a nuclear weapon that arms dealers want to sell. A group of Chechen terrorists are hoping to buy the bomb so that they can detonate it in Los Angeles as a form of retaliation against the United States for assassinating their leader.

Seagal apparently abandoned the shoot of “Black Dawn” before filming the action sequences. The stunt doubles are so noticeable in this movie. Amanda Stuart (Tamara Davies) is another secret agent and she was trained by Cold. Seagal and Davies have no onscreen chemistry whatsoever. There are just too many bad guys in this movie. We have the arms dealers, the Chechen militants and some shadowy government figures. None of them are well written so you’ll easily forget about them after the movie is over.

“Black Dawn” has opening with possibly the worst audio editing I’ve heard in a motion picture. We repeatedly hear the same lines of dialog and it’s just so irritating. Things don’t get much better as the action sequences are really unimpressive, the special effects look really bad and the plot is a mess. “The Foreigner” had a lot of problems but it’s way better than “Black Dawn”. Really, I should not compare the two as “Black Dawn” is as much a sequel to “The Foreigner” as virtually any other Seagal film. Even fans of Seagal are likely to be unimpressed by this one as the use of stunt doubles is so obvious.