Under Siege

Since I reviewed the Van Damme vs Seagal script, I felt it was only fair that I watched a couple of their movies. I started doing the Steven Seagal course of Seagalogy, where I would watch each and every one of Steven Seagal's movies but alas, I could not handle the sheer badassery of Steven Seagal. My brain can not cram in a Seagal movie every night and thus has been put on hold until further recovery.

Under Siege is Steven Seagal's answer to Die Hard, this is Die Hard on a Boat!! Not that one, the other one, you know the battle ship not the cruise liner. We'll get to that one another day.

Under Siege is about a cook named Casey Ryback. Steven Seagal plays a cook because he presumably would kick everyone's ass in whatever war America's going to be in and is deemed too powerful a weapon to use. Because of this, he cooks for the crew in the ship instead (his skills with a knife are only paralleled by his delicate taste in food). Seagal butts heads with Gary Busey who's his commanding officer or some shit and after more shit happens that piss off Busey, Busey orders his men to lock Seagal down in the freezer.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a loose canon former C.I.A. agent who seizes control of the battleship and is in league with Gary Busy, who plays his usual crazy as hell sonuvabitch character, except this time, he does it in drag! Ok, it's only for a small scene or two but damn was it crazy. Tommy Lee Jones' team infiltrates the battleship under the guise of being a band hired for the birthday celebrations of their captain. Busey remembers that Seagal is locked in a freezer and sends some of his men to take care of them. Little do they know, Seagal is going to take care of those guys, only not with food.

Once those mooks go down to the chamber, Steven Seagal unleashes a can of whoop-ass. They just opened a pandora's box... OF PAIN!!!

We next get a stripper pop up from a birthday cake, played by Erika Eleniak, in full tittied glory.

Other side of this image is NSFW

Somehow, I think I remember watching that scene when I was a little kid... Wha? It's my uncle's fault... Anyways, she starts crying like women are prone to do in action movies when they see dead bodies but she's not your usual female character in the action movie. She agrees to help Seagal save the fucking day.

So Tommy Lee Jones plans on taking the nuclear warheads in the battleship and selling it off to some foreign country and making a nice amount of cash. But Seagal's not having any of that shit. American things stay in America. And those warheads are American.

Next, we see Seagal really fucking up everyone's plans; he explodes a microwave that killed/wounded some of Tommy Lee Jones' men, he explodes a helicopter, he explodes a submarine, and he explodes some more shit because not only is he a kick-ass marine, he's also an explosives expert. This information is brilliantly given to us through people telling us about it, I think they call it exposition. When he saves the day, he even explodes the NUCLEAR WARHEAD that had it's target aimed at Hawaii.

In more seriousness, Under Siege is a rather serviceable Die Hard Knock-off, it even gets it's own Die Hard knock-off moment when Seagal explodes a helicopter and jumps off the boat with only a piece of rope (or something to that equivelent on a battle ship, I guess military rope?) like John McClane with the fire hose. The only thing that the film suffers from is an invincible army of one in Steven Seagal. He gets by the story without so much as breaking a sweat and gets to look badass doing it. It's because of this that the film never feels tense, we don't have to wonder what happens next, we KNOW what's going to happen next, Steven Seagal chopping down another bad guy and saving the goddamn day.

But damn if it isn't good to see Seagal kick ass and take names. Probably one of the other highlights of the film is Erika Eleniak kicking ass. I don't know, but there's something sexy about a chick taking action into her own hands and taking names with the main character. Plus, women don't get to kick enough ass in movies nowadays, not unless your name ends in Jolie and rhymes with Brangelina.

I know, my condescending voice makes it sound like I hated this movie, but no, I found it to be a fun distraction. It doesn't do much for the action genre but hey, chicks with guns and Steven Seagal, a crazy Gary Busey, and an even crazier Tommy Lee Jones. What's not to love?

7/10

Plus I learned on wikipedia that Casey Ryback is a Canadian, so extra props there.