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:
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.
*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.
