Under Siege

Directed by Andrew Davis, Under Siege follows Steven Seagal’s Casey Ryback as he sets out to subvert a nefarious band of terrorists (led by Tommy Lee Jones’ Bill Strannix) aboard a soon-to-be-decommissioned battleship. It’s a seriously appealing premise that’s employed to distressingly erratic effect by Davis, as the filmmaker, working from J. F. Lawton’s script, delivers a hit-and-miss narrative that rarely exploits the setup to the extent one might’ve hoped – with the movie containing all-too-few sequences of Seagal’s tough-as-nails figure stealthily taking down the terrorists one by one. Instead, Davis takes a more big-picture approach to the scenario and generally stresses the exploits of a multitude of periphery figures – with little of this stuff as interesting or compelling as the filmmaker has obviously intended. It’s clear, then, that Under Siege benefits substantially from Seagal’s engaging turn as the seemingly unstoppable protagonist, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the picture is at its best when focused on Casey’s exciting, visceral hand-to-hand fights with various henchmen. (The climactic battle between Casey and Bill stands as an obvious highlight within the entire proceedings, to be sure.) The end result is a decent actioner that could and should have been so much better, with the Die–Hard-on-ship storyline rarely utilized to its maximum potential.

**1/2 out of ****