Under Siege (1992)

The US Missouri – a battleship carrying nuclear armaments – is on its final trip before being decommissioned. A bunch of evildoers under the leadership of one William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones dressed like Bruce Springsteen circa 1985) has decided this is the best moment to hijack the ship, steal the missiles and sell them to the highest bidder. Because they have the ship’s XO Commander Krill (Gary Busey) – yes, that’s really his name – on their side, the pirates manage to get on board posing as entertainers for the Captain’s surprise birthday party and are so able to ambush the ship’s crew completely unawares and lock them up quite well.

All of the crew, that is, but chief cook Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal). As it happens, Ryback is not just an apparently great cook and a smug bastard but also a badass marine, so before anyone can say “Die Hard on a battleship”, he’s already teaming up with the playmate (Erika Eleniak) the bad guys brought with them for no good reason whatsoever, and starts to solve the little situation.

Ah, the times when some people in Hollywood thought they could turn Steven Seagal into a big budget action movie carrying star instead of the guy not even cutting it in direct to home video films he turned out to be. The positive side of this foolhardy endeavour for Under Siege is that Seagal is teamed with a whole bunch of people who are actually good at their jobs. While repeat-Seagal director Andrew Davis surely will never be confused with a great artist, he was at the time a more than decent director for this sort of bread and potatoes studio action movie, able to stage convincing and fun action sequences, keeping the explosions in focus, and certainly knowledgeable of enough of the tricks of his trade to make a highly entertaining bit of action cinema that looks and feels slick and flows well.

Add to that Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey apparently trying to outdo each other with their expressions of cheesy action movie villainy, as well as the horrors the costume department comes up for them - Busey outdoing Jones’s Boss-style with a bit of cross-dressing that isn’t embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch at all, oh no - and the fun factor heightens considerably.

Topping off the good parts of the film is an absolutely shameless script whose silliness only begins with having the villains act as undercover entertainers like the good guys in a 70s Bollywood masala infiltrating a villain’s lair. There is also many an absurd dialogue scene to witness (Wallace’s bizarre phone conversations with the prospective buyers of the missiles need to be heard to be believed), more ridiculous plotting than one could reasonably expect from a single movie, and bonus scenes supposedly taking place in the Pentagon so hokey, the 50s are embarrassed.


The film’s only problem is Seagal. He is, as we all know, a terrible actor with a tendency to exclusively project unfounded smugness, his martial arts skills look worse than anything the actors in the film who don’t pretend they have a martial arts background present, and his line delivery is so wooden as to make Chuck Norris look like an actor. He’s even out-thesped by Eleniak, and the poor woman’s really only in the movie to show off her implants. Seagal just doesn’t work as an actor, an action hero or even just a plain heroic figure, but thanks to the efforts of everyone else involved, he’s not as painful to watch as in most of his other films. Which, given that he’s the nominal lead of the piece, is quite an achievement by Davis and co.