Under Siege
At one time, the popularity of the Die Hard series was so huge that several other producers were itching to enter the sweepstakes themselves by coming up with their own variations on the formula which would of course involve terrorists taking over a place where people were at and holding them hostage while a lone hero works under the radar to take out the bastards one by one and ultimately saves the day. This 1992 release is certainly one of the best (but definitely not THE best) of the wanna be Die Hards and the irony of the limited creative process involving such a project came to the fore when the word got out that Die Hard 3 was being developed around this time as taking place on a cruise ship where John and Holly McClane were celebrating their second honeymoon until some more unlucky terrorists would wind up taking over the vessel and thus be subject to his wrath. Unfortunately, with the release of this film (and the awful Speed 2: Cruise Control), the Die Hard filmmakers would scrap those plans and be forced to look elsewhere for their story. But the film we got here was still pretty good, taking place on a Navy battleship and was greatly aided by a brisk pace being set by director Andrew Davis and three top notch actors playing the trio of main villains. For the starring role, we got Steven Seagal, still riding high on his hot streak of major films starting with Above The Law (and well before he was relegated to working solely in Eastern Europe and then later became a de facto ambassador for Vladimir Putin and Russia) and here coming up with his second best film ever (with only his lean and mean action revenge classic Hard To Kill being superior). Seagal plays Casey Ryback, a chief petty officer and cook onboard the battleship, popular with his fellow enlisted men but not so much with most of the officers on the ship who consider him to be a misfit and insubordinate if not for the fact that he seems to be protected by the ship’s captain (Patrick O’Neal) who has him there as his own personal cook and looks at him as almost being like an adopted son whom he looks out for. Turns out that there’s a good reason for that as Seagal is actually an ex Navy SEAL who came back from a mission gone bad only to punch out his commanding officer for giving him lousy intel that resulted in all of his men being killed, causing him to be demoted down to his current status where the captain then took him under his wing. This history of course is known only to Seagal and the captain so while the officers look at him with disdain, the other deck swabbers whom he hangs out with down in the kitchen consider him to be a regular guy and one of their own. The shadowy nature of Seagal’s past turns out to be a key factor when it’s announced that a surprise party is being thrown for the captain, one that involves a band and a Playboy Playmate popping out of a cake to everyone’s delight. It turns out that the band and privately hired caterers are all mercenary terrorists who kill the captain and several of the officers and sailors onboard before taking over the ship, namely the weapons command center which controls the ship’s missiles (including the ones with nuclear warheads) and it’s also where we meet the three primary villains that head up the group, all played by great actors. First, we get Colm Meaney (best known for Star Trek Deep Space Nine and as the asshole blowhard DEA agent in Con Air) as the weapons and finance expert of the group who comes to admire Seagal’s abilities even while Seagal is killing off his own men. Next up is the legendary Gary Busey as Commander Krill, second in command of the vessel (and the one who clashes most often with Seagal) who becomes a bona fide traitor when he himself murders the captain (and assumes the mocking role of being the ship’s captain for the rest of the way even though he’s actually not in charge of the operation) and shows himself to be allied with the terrorists who’ve taken the ship and murdered his fellow seamen (not much of a conflict for him since the men didn’t like him much anyway and the captain had written up negative reports on his performance). Finally, there is Tommy Lee Jones as William Strannix, former CIA mercenary and the boss of the operation. Now right there, one might think that Jones is too good of an actor to be playing the bad guy in a Steven Seagal action movie and you’d be right until one realizes that casting him was truly a lucky break that got the film some real notice. The script itself gives Jones almost nothing to work with and worse, the backstory, exposition and motivation for his character are pretty sparse to say the least, save for the fact that he had worked for the CIA which had later tried to kill him and failed (which played into Malkovich’s motivation for In The Line Of Fire which was out around the same time), causing him to seek revenge and further his “revolution”, of which what exactly that revolution is about comes off as being pretty vague except for possibly the 60s counterculture revolution(!). Nonetheless, Jones still manages to be pretty wacky and hilarious from the word go, masquerading as a member of the band (although he neither sings nor plays a instrument except a harmonica) with his lame attempts at pretending to be a hipster musician being funny simply because he’s so bad at it since he’s really just a trained killer undercover, but at least Jones nobly tries to fill in the blanks handed to him by the script especially when they get to the “insanity” angle of his character where even his own men start to think he’s legitimately unstable based upon his erratic behavior. Turns out that these terrorists don’t even have any demands, preferring instead to just steal the tomahawk missiles and nuclear warheads on board so that they can sell them on the black market for a huge profit (which would actually make them pirates instead). Even moreso, there are several characters who are introduced in the film’s first twenty minutes (even played by major actors such as Bernie Casey) who literally wind up being lost in the shuffle once the mayhem starts, leaving it unclear due to the frenetic pacing whether they were either killed or imprisoned with the other sailors in the bowels of the ship (as Busey appears to be the only crew member who was in cahoots with the bad guys). Plus as Seagal stealthily skulks through the vessel picking off the bad guys, he’s given a rather unnecessary sidekick in the form of the aforementioned Playboy Playmate (Erika Eleniak, herself a real life Playmate) who was supposed to pop out of the cake at the party and was apparently the only member of the invading group who not only was not aware of the plan nor was she considered to be a key component of the plan itself (although it probably cost them some serious money to hire her) and now tagging along with Seagal (and being made to carry all his gear), she contributes little more to the film other than looking cute and whining a lot (although the script does manage to transform her into a stone cold killer by the end). Perhaps the funniest thing of all though (besides the sight of Busey in full drag for a few scenes) is the opening scenes depicting a speech given by then real life President George H.W. Bush (aka Bush 1) on the ship complete with real film footage integrated into the film of the real Bush on the ship giving that very speech with the timeline of the story saying that the captain’s surprise birthday party (where the terrorists took the ship) was actually the very next day(!), making one wonder if these bad guys were maybe a bit suspect in their timing given that they could have had a much more valuable prize in their hands then just a few tomahawk missiles. The final scenes are quite good though, with Jones being so crazed by this point that he is seemingly more interested in instigating Armageddon (by nuking Honolulu) than in actually making any kind of money and Seagal in confronting him doing the best acting of his career by telling him how in essence all military personnel are basically puppets who are doing a thankless job. The film’s success managed to spawn a sequel (with Busey nearly being cast to reprise his turncoat traitor as the main villain before they thought better of it) and Seagal (despite a legion of detractors) continued to show here that he had tons of charisma and screen presence which in the hands of a gifted action director could be utilized to make movies that were more than anything purely entertaining at their core…
8/10