Review: Under Siege (1992)

Under Siege is the best Steven Seagal movie. That’s the popular opinion and it mostly holds true. Directed by Andrew Davis (who’d go on to make The Fugitive the following year), the film works as Die Hard on a boat. Seagal’s Chief Petty Officer Casey Ryback, a former Navy SEAL and now current personal chef to the captain of the USS Missouri, has to take down a group of mercenaries, led by Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey, who commandeer the ship in order to steal its arsenal of nuclear missiles. 

The screenplay is a ripoff of Die Hard—there’s a party on the boat for the captain’s birthday, an infiltration by the mercenaries posing as the band, the hostage taking, and then the counterattack by Ryback, who happens to be locked in a freezer when the attack goes down and to have the necessary skills to take out the mercenaries one-by-one. But considering Die Hard is such an efficient model of action storytelling, why mess with what works?

However, there are tweaks to the formula. In Die Hard, Bruce Willis’s John McClane is notable for how ordinary he is. He’s brave and can shoot a gun, but he’s also in over his head and saves the day as much through luck and perseverance as skill. In contrast, Steven Seagal’s Ryback is constructed as the most dangerous man in the world. He may spend the first 20 minutes fretting about the perfect bouillabaisse and telling bawdy kitchen stories in a terrible Cajun accent, but true to form for a Steven Seagal character, he’s also a trained killer, martial arts master, and seemingly comfortable with every form of technology and weapon he encounters. When the stripper the crew hires for the captain’s birthday, Erika Eleniak’s Jordan Tate (Playboy’s Miss July ’89)—who first encounters Ryback when she bursts out of a cake ala Marilyn Monroe—remarks that he’s “no chef” after seeing him dispatch several mercenaries, you want to respond to her, “Yeah, no shit.”

How this lump of uncharismatic clay became a movie star is beyond me. He’s a bad actor, mumbling his lines with a baffling, throaty soft-spoken lilt, and he’s not even physically intimidating. He’s tall and has a ponytail and an ultra serious demeanor, but he moves like a lumbering bear whose knees don’t work too well anymore. Under Siege succeeds in spite of Seagal and focuses on the other characters as much as it can during its 102-minute runtime.

The screenplay is tightly constructed and follows the necessary beats for a Die Hard ripoff, while the rest of the cast and director Andrew Davis are up to the task of entertaining. The pacing is lean and propulsive: things are always happening in this movie, which is a hallmark of 1990s action entertainment in general. The shot construction is nothing special—mostly cutting between close-ups and simple movements during the action scenes: dollies, trucks, pans, whip-pans, etc. Davis isn’t the kind of director to dazzle with his camera like Michael Bay, but he knows where to point the camera and how to keep things moving.

Davis also has great affection for Tommy Lee Jones, who hams it up spectacularly as the villain, former CIA operative and now mercenary William Strannix. Adorned with a headband, shaggy mullet, and leather jacket, Jones’ performance as Strannix anticipates elements of both his Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995) and his Oscar-winning role of US Marshal Samuel Gerard in Davis’s The Fugitive (1993) One minute, Strannix is hooting and cackling and having a grand ol’ time with his band of mercenaries; other moments, he’s barking orders or quietly threatening the crew. The manic energy gives way to lethal efficiency. He’s everything Seagal is not. Add in Colm Meaney as one of Strannix’s lieutenants and Gary Busey doing Gary Busey things as the traitorous executive officer, and you’ve got character actor magic that makes up for the charisma deficit at the film’s centre.

It’s hard to argue that Under Siege is some great work of 1990s action. There’s still too much Steven Seagal in this film for its own good. But all the elements that make 1990s action movies so entertaining—the pacing, the shootouts, the clarity of character motivation, the surprises and reversals and commitment to showing on-screen stakes instead of simply talking about them—are here in Under Siege. Too bad the “best Steven Seagal movie” is only good, when removing Seagal from the equation could’ve made it great.

6 out of 10

Under Siege (1992, USA)

Directed by Andrew Davis; written by J. F. Lawton; starring Steven Seagal, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Busey, Erika Eleniak, Colm Meaney, Patrick O’Neal, Andy Romano, Dale Dye, Nick Mancuso.

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