Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.

Review #2552: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.

Cast: 

Steven Seagal (Lieutenant Casey Ryback), Eric Bogosian (Travis Dane), Everett McGill (Marcus Penn), Katherine Heigl (Sarah Ryback), Morris Chestnut (Bobby Zachs), Nick Mancuso (Tom Breaker), Brenda Bakke (Captain Linda Gilder), Peter Greene (Mercenary #1), Patrick Kilpatrick (Mercenary #2), Scott Sowers (Mercenary #3), Afifi Alaouie (Fatima), Andy Romano (Admiral Bates), Dale Dye (Captain Nick Garza), Kurtwood Smith (Major General Stanley Cooper), and David Gianopoulos (Captain David Trilling) Directed by Geoff Murphy.

Review: 

"Films have a mind of their own, they are living entities. You discover them. I made a [Steven] Seagal film [Under Siege 2: Dark Territory] in America. It was a very dreary process and very highly contentious at the time - lots of arguments and stuff. There was a point during the editing where I observed this incredibly high energy beast emerging, and I didn't know where it had come from, because there wasn't any of that energy on the set. It seemed to grow out of the editing process. Whereas others, if you finish a shoot and think 'we've just shot a real beauty', then you're probably in trouble. Because they can jump up and bite you."

Yes, there was a second Under Siege movie. This was the seventh film with Steven Seagal as a star but the first one to come out after the ridiculously overblown On Deadly Ground (1994). You remember Under Siege (1992), right? The original script had been done by Matt Reeves and his college friend Richard Hatem, as they wanted to break into the market of spec scripts with action, with the script (with a working title of "Dark Territory", since, well, it refers to running track not controlled by signals) being described as "meant to be very much like a Die Hard movie". The market crashed for scripts, but it eventually was optioned and converted to what you see, with various script doctors such as Brian Helgeland delivering un-credited work. According to Chestnut, a good deal of the film was improvised, specifically when Seagal was on screen, which basically went, “Okay, this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to say this, I’m going to say this, then I’m going to do that and then you’re going to do that.” This was the last major production for its director Geoff Murphy, who had moved to Hollywood filmmaking after making films in his native New Zealand such as Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), Utu (1983) and The Quiet Earth (1985) that resulted in films such as Young Guns II (1990), Freejack (1992), and, well, this. He kept a busy profile with work in TV, smaller-scale stuff such as Race Against Time (2000) along with second-unit work on The Lord of the Rings. He died in 2018 at the age of 80. Made on a budget of $60 million (double the original), the movie was a mild box office hit, albeit not on the level of the original. Seagal's* next two films the following year were Executive Decision (a supporting role where he took a backseat plane ride to Kurt Russell) and The Glimmer Man. 

Is it unnecessary? Maybe. Is it not as good as the previous Under Siege? Mostly, yea. Is it worth it? Well, you know, I think so. I suppose this is where the apex of Seagal as a "star" has hit, complete with using a Apple Newton MessagePad 100 to really make this a high-tech thriller. But hey, a movie based in tension about trying to take a top-secret weapon looming in space with a hacker and multiple keyboards? This happened to be released a few months before Goldeneye, by the way. Sure, this is a movie that doesn't have the magic of two villains like before with Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey, but Bogosian, combined with the company of a cast that clearly is acting around Seagal, does hold the movie up enough to at least make the movie worth a check. Seagal, well, he mainly is there to lumber around and kick, with ounces of fun only really coming from seeing this guy seemingly try to hide the urge to say/do insane stuff when not engaged in the concentration of being the one-man army (okay, not always one-man, because Chestnut is there at times). He outruns a train crash, for God's sake. Bogosian saw Alan Rickman play a villain in Die Hard (1988) and decided, no I'm not kidding, that he wanted to play "a big, old fat villain in a big action movie". Sure, the end result had a bit of silliness due to the encouragement of Murphy to do so, but he apparently is quite satisfied with how it turned out with a crazed hacker wanting plenty of $ that quotes Louis Pasteur. And I agree with him! He is delightfully fun in this movie, managing to evoke menace with a jagged edge of wit. Then you have folks like McGill (a few years removed from being warmly cool in Twin Peaks*) trying to act tough (as one does when not being foiled by pepper spray) that amuses me greatly in his stature and the eventual result (nobody gets a long fight in this dojo). Chestnut provides a few chuckles as basically the Argyle equivalent that gets to trek across a train and throw people off helicopters while Heigl, well, there's always room to be a character in a different movie. It's an efficient movie for 100 minutes that fiddles in the ride of knowing what you are getting into with goofy scenarios (dropping people off helicopters, big ticking clocks) that you either appreciate or dismiss when it concludes. I liked it fine, and I'll accept the confusion over saying a movie with a middling lead does in fact work enough with the support under him to make it one to recommend. 

 

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

song of the day!

*If one goes by what Heigl said or Jenny McCarthy said about auditioning (link here), it was definitely a strange experience being around Seagal.

*I'm still in the second season. We shall see about the movie. Also, he ruled in Licence to Kill.

Under Siege.

Review #1877: Under Siege.

Cast: 

Steven Seagal (Chief Petty Officer Casey Ryback), Tommy Lee Jones (William Strannix), Gary Busey (Commander Peter Krill), Erika Eleniak (Jordan Tate), Colm Meaney (Daumer), Patrick O'Neal (Captain J.T. Adams), Andy Romano (Admiral Bates), Dale Dye (Captain Nick Garza), Nick Mancuso (Tom Breaker), Damian Chapa (Tackman), Tom Wood (Private Nash), Troy Evans (Granger), Dennis Lipscomb (Trenton), Bernie Casey (Commander Harris), Glenn Morshower (Ensign Taylor), and Raymond Cruz (Ramirez) Directed by Andrew Davis (#176 - The Fugitive and #187 - Holes)

Review: 

“Most people are surprised that the film is as sophisticated as it is. It appeals to people who have a point of view about nuclear weapons and the story thrusts you into an incredible situation that is not far-fetched.” - Andrew Davis

Admittedly, the sentence "A movie considered to be one of the best with Steven Seagal" is not exactly a big selling phrase in the realm of picking out action movies. This was the fifth film for an actor that in some ways looks and sounds like what would happen if a Soldier of Fortune ad came to life, one that you may remember had gone from stunt coordinator to starring in Above the Law (1988), which had been directed by Andrew Davis, who had only been known as an action director because of Code of Silence (1985). Davis would get to work with Jones again after their collaboration on The Package (1989). The writer for Under Siege was J. F. Lawton (a former member of the Coast Guard Reserve), who wrote it as a spec script named Dreadnought, which evidently was written with a big budget in mind before it got scaled down (Lawton would also serve as an executive producer, and like a number of his films, Seagal also produced the movie) to be made for roughly $35 million. Seagal actually turned the film down a couple of times, apparently because he was resistant to the character played by Eleniak, calling the character as a "bimbo", but revisions were done that pleased him, with him calling the film "an adventure, not an action movie" with human moments and humor (he has since claimed it was his idea to have the character in the film for humor, but can you really take that seriously?). At any rate, Seagal got to be director and star for On Deadly Ground (1994) in exchange for participating in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (with Romano, Mancuso and Dye returning), which takes place on a train. As for Davis, he got the job for The Fugitive (1993) because of how Harrison Ford liked what he saw from this film.

The strange thing is that the film only features Seagal sparingly if you really think about it, since he is basically present for about 40 minutes of a 103-minute film (this fact was apparently presented to Davis by a Warner Bros. executive as to why he should direct). The ship (USS Alabama, which was docked in Alabama) is basically the most important presence of the film anyways, given the scenario of the film (basically Die Hard on a battleship). It moves along full speed with execution being at the forefront in terms of action staging and (let's just say) quirky characters to carry the movie, complete with playing on an actual real-world development of US Navy surface ships having their nuclear weapons removed in 1991. To be generous to Seagal, he does well with the material given to him in part because he seems relaxed here, one who can play on the silly parts of the script (the cook who happens to be a former Navy SEAL being teamed up with a Playboy playmate) without coming off as wooden or out-of-touch. In other words: if you let him kick and try not to say too much, he does fine. Besides, with Busey and Jones on the other side of the coin, how can you go wrong? Man is it fun to see these two get to play adversary, particularly from Jones. Busey can chew on scenery like it was a solid piece of steak, let's get that out of the way, since he gets to grit his teeth in brazen intensity, complete with doing mayhem in a dress for a few moments. Jones still manages to be the key attraction, doing so with manic chaos in all the enjoyable over-the-top ways. Naturally, he gets the best ending sequence, because of course he does, as him and Seagal get to make faces in hand-to-hand combat before he gets taken down with the art of overkill: his eye gets gouged, then he gets stabbed in the head before he is pushed into an electrical radar screen (this plays right into my theory that one could cut Seagal films into a horror movie, since one other guy gets pushed into a band saw). Eleniak (an TV actress and model with one obvious showstopper scene) is okay, mainly there to add a few chuckles in the attempts at making Seagal and her look like a normal tandem despite both a considerable height difference (basically a head), which does work out for a few neat moments. Meaney may be playing just an Irish heavy but being a Star Trek alum makes one smile anyways, while O'Neal (in his final film role) makes a decent character presence/sacrificial lamb. The film makes for a solid thriller, mostly because one gets a collection of good action beats without sacrificing much in the plot stakes. For some odd reason, there are plans for a reboot of this film, which confuses me in part because how can you improve on what was? The accomplishment of the film is not so much the plot but the maneuvering of spectacle and familiar actors to the right places for fun, and that is more suited for original filmmaking rather than drawing from the well. At any rate, it is the direction of Davis in making a suitable thriller in confined space that helps to bring Under Siege into winning material even as it reaches three decades of age.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.