Under Siege

After having watched Half Past Dead I decided to also watch Under Siege again, probably the best Steven Seagal movie. The whole movie takes place on a battleship that is overtaken by a group mercinaries. The crew is locked up while the mercenaries plan to remove all the warheads from the ship. Only 1 crew member, the cook, is not locked up with the rest of the crew but is instead locked up the freezer of the kitchen. When some mercenaries come to eliminate the cook he manages to neutralise them instead and escapes. What follows is a cat and mouse game between the cook, played by Steven Seagal, and the mercenaries and as Seagal kills more and more mercenaries it is revealed that the cook is in fact an ex Navy Seal. The movie could be described as Die Hard on a boat. With the distinction that Under Siege lacks the humour and funny one-liners. The performance of Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman lifted that movie to another category. Steven Seagal and Tommy Lee Jones are good in Under Siege but the movie is more of a no nonsense action movie. Bullets are sprayed through the narrow metal corridors yet somehow all manage to miss Seagal while his bullets always hit the mark. In the confined spaces of the battleship all these bullets flying around without doing harm becomes quite ridiculous. Luckily there is also a lot of action without guns where Seagal takes out his opponents in hand to and combat in his typical brutal style. Certainly not bad, but also not great. Most characters lack depth, the only ones that have a character that allows you to connect to are Tommy Lee Jones as the leader of the gang, a tormented ex CIA operative who survived an assassination attempt by the CIA and is out for revenge and Gary Busey, commander on the battleship and in league with the mercenaries. Busey portrays an especially unlikable character. Without them the movie would not have been worth watching.