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.

U.S. Marshals.

Review #1692: U.S. Marshals.

Cast: 

Tommy Lee Jones (Sam Gerard), Wesley Snipes (Mark J. Sheridan / Mark Roberts / Mark Warren), Robert Downey Jr (John Royce), Joe Pantoliano (Cosmo Renfro), Daniel Roebuck (Bobby Biggs), Tom Wood (Noah Newman), LaTanya Richardson (Savannah Cooper), Irène Jacob (Marie Bineaux), Kate Nelligan (Catherine Walsh), Patrick Malahide (Bertram Lamb), Rick Snyder (Frank Barrows), and Michael Paul Chan (Xiang Chen) Directed by Stuart Baird.

Review:

Do you remember The Fugitive? A long time ago, I was first introduced to it by the 1993 film, one of a string of adaptations of familiar television shows that have been quite prevalent over the past few decades. The original series had ran for four seasons from 1963 to 1967 involving the chase of an escaped convict (an innocent victim of blind justice) that goes from place to place trying to clear his name while an lieutenant bound to enforce the law is keen on catching him. The show was created by Roy Huggins (whose previous successes included Maverick, which also saw a film adaptation in the mid 1990s) with Quinn Martin producing the show; supposedly the idea for the show was based on the real-life trial of Sam Sheppard, who was convicted but subsequently acquitted of the murder of his wife, although Huggins denied this (at any rate, Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables is likely the most evident inspiration). Oh, and it happened to be one of the first notable series finales ever broadcast on television, but that's besides the point. The reason I mention all of this is to provide context for when a film adaptation of the show eventually came to pass, one that modified details within an attempt at making a thriller capped by one big stunt (with a train, what else?). It did its own interpretation of the main two characters that retained a good deal of the claustrophobic feel of the series that works in character-driven drama with plenty of shots of Chicago that seemed distinct and useful when compared to the anthology premises used by the show. It wasn't a perfect movie by any means (since it inadvertently captured the fuzzy resolution of trying to cap a thriller with shaky explanations that the show also had), but it certainly received enough notice from folks to stand well among its time, even after nearly three decades. One of the benefactors from that success was Tommy Lee Jones, who won an Academy Award for his performance in that film; if you remember correctly, Jones spent screen time either paired with an elusive Ford or paired with the folks on the hunt for him that ranged from Joe Pantoliano to Johnny Lee Davenport (i.e. a supporting cast of five), and most of that supporting cast returns here. As with this film, Huggins served as one of the executive producers, while John Pogue served as screenwriter.

Are you surprised that this movie came out five years after the success of The Fugitive? Or is the real surprise the fact that this "spinoff" was even created at all? Nay, the true surprise is how average the movie is, a movie that is blandly unnecessary yet never infuriating enough to stop watching (if only because of the folks involved). In other words, if you've seen one movie about a fugitive on the run, watch The Fugitive. You could replace Jones and his character with any kind of generic hero and probably not lose much when it comes to entertainment value (incidentally, Stuart Baird had served as the editor on a variety of action films that ranged from Lethal Weapon (1987) to Demolition Man (1993) before debuting as director with Executive Decision in 1996). The movie builds on the idea of "innocent man on the run" in trying to add a conspiracy aspect to it that results in a very muddled movie that takes quite a while to really do anything of circumstance, and we are talking about a 131 minute movie. When one starts talking about innocent fugitives who are also former CIA operatives after we see him nearly get taken down by zip guns hidden in a prison plane, the brain starts to check out. The performances are relatively fine, in that the main group of Marshals roll with the clichés without turning into complete cardboard (i.e. you don't groan at the banter). However, Snipes certainly suffers the most when it comes to having to deal with the muddled focus, contrasting oddly with Jones in the levels of interest despite having (on paper) more to work with in terms of people to bounce off than Ford had to do in the first film (i.e. Jacob, although she is merely just okay here), and yet it still feels a bit hollow. I like Jones just fine for this film, but he clearly had better material to work with before, in that there isn't anything that really stands to interest a newcomer or one familiar with the first one. Of course, if one likes seeing Jones or Snipes as actors, one could be fine with what they see anyway, since bad movies with a favorite actor can theoretically still be interesting to view (for example, there are folks who probably can stomach Blade: Trinity for Snipes just as I remind myself of the amusement I share in thinking about Volcano (1997) with Jones in its monumental amusement factor). Downey has described this as one of his worst filming experiences, going so far as to call it "the worst action movie of all time", one that depressed him and made him rather be in prison than wake up on the set of it again. It likely doesn't help that he seems a bit miscast here, and we are talking about a movie that barely has that much energy to go with in the first place. Really though, a great deal of the movie could be summed up as "on paper", in that the idea of a film about folks pursuing people on the run could on paper be interesting, or maybe the idea of seeing where a guy like Gerald goes after having spent considerable time catching one innocent fugitive goes (on paper). Instead, one gets a mild movie that seems to have the odors of studio notes, where the demand to try and top the stunts that captured attention before go hand in hand with trying to wring originality out of familiar pulp. The swinging stunt onto a passing train is likely the most notable scene from the movie (the plane crash is a close second, but yeah), and if it is taken as just a movie for distraction without taking too much into its middling middle-ness, it might prove inoffensive enough to see once. As a whole, it is an unnecessary spinoff that doesn't equally doesn't do much to spin on what had been done years before while serving average in every other aspect that will either mean a movie one will pass on seeing or find to be a mild curiosity on a long boring night.

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Movie Night: The Fugitive (1993).

Review #176: The Fugitive.

Cast
Harrison Ford (Dr. Richard Kimble), Tommy Lee Jones (Deputy U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard), Sela Ward (Helen Kimble), Joe Pantoliano (Deputy U.S. Marshal Cosmo Renfro), Andreas Katsulas (Fredrick Sykes), Jeroen Krabbé (Dr. Charles Nichols), Daniel Roebuck (Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Biggs), Tom Wood (Deputy U.S. Marshal Noah Newman), L. Scott Caldwell (Deputy U.S. Marshal Erin Poole), and Julianne Moore (Dr. Anne Eastman) Directed by Andrew Davis

Cast
This movie was based off the classic 1960s TV show of the same name. Ford and Jones are excellent, playing off each other great. Jones does the best job, conveying a sense of ell, doing his job as a US Marshall. As the movie continues on, the doubt against Kimble unravels which you see from Gerard's point of view. One thing I notice is that it turns from escape film to conspiracy as the film gets to the end which feels a bit odd. But nevertheless, this film is heart pounding with good amounts of action in an excellent film.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.