The Siege by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
I came away from The Siege as a big proponent of martial law. Not because of anything that took place on the screen, mind you, but because of the people sitting behind me at the theater. They didn't talk throughout the whole entire movie, but they did interject annoying little comments at every suspenseful moment. I wouldn't have minded one little bit if a squad of Green Berets had dragged them out of the theater and placed them in one of the mini-concentration camps we see in The Siege, where they would be condemned to watch Hudson Hawk over and over again to make them properly respectful of the movie-going experience.
Given the opportunity to command, I think we'd all like to use the nation's military in creative, fun ways. Elderly drivers on the interstate would be less of a problem if "Slower Traffic Keep Right" was enforced by tanks. Marine guards stationed at ATMs would discourage those who habitually take more than a minute to make a withdrawal. If the Corps of Engineers can control flooding, surely they can fix my dripping faucet.
The concept of martial law is a powerful temptation, and the makers of The Siege have given wholeheartedly. What they have done is take a perfectly good police procedural movie -- Law and Order writ large -- and turn it into a movie about the inappropriate use of military officials. Although General Bruce Willis and his merry band of soldiers do nothing more creative with their military firepower than block the Brooklyn Bridge with tanks and torture terrorist suspects, they manage to derail The Siege and twist it into nothing more than a civil libertarian's paranoid fantasy.
The Siege starts off oh-so-promisingly with Denzel Washington leading a team of FBI counterterrorism experts through New York City in pursuit of Palestinian terrorists fond of wearing plastique underwear. There really isn't anything bad to say about the first half of the movie -- plenty of explosions, plenty of good police work, all the elements of a good action film. The Siege is pretty good about busting up some of the action-movie cliches, although one expects that a really smart terrorist group would have at least considered blowing up the obligatory post-arrest party at the local cop watering hole.
Washington does his usual, effective job as the FBI's top man against terrorism. He's charming when he has to be, tough as nails, honest yet capable of some trickery. However, this is his third or fourth movie where he's played a cop -- Fallen, most recently -- and it just seems that he's wasting his time and talents here. (No one really wants to see Denzel typecast the same way that Sidney Poitier and Yaphet Kotto are, do they?)
Denzel's foil throughout is Annette Bening, who plays a CIA officer who knows a whole lot more than she's telling -- which is nothing. Bening was a very brave choice for the casting director, who could have put a Demi Moore clone in the role -- someone who would have played rough and tough with the big boys. Instead, Bening is smart, vulnerable, a little ditzy, and completely believable. However, the great surprise of this movie is Denzel's partner, Tony Shalhoub. Those who have seen him only on TV are in for a treat. He delivers laughs with deadpan humor, but he also handles the emotional scenes well after his son is kidnapped by the Army later in the movie.
The real problem The Siege has is that it can't invent an effective way for the police to counter terrorism. This, of course, isn't just a movie problem, and it's probably not the fault of the filmmakers that they can't figure out a good way for their characters to hunt down terrorists. (The movie starts with the real-life bombing of American military barracks in Saudi Arabia, another terrorist crime that hasn't been solved.) With the lack of anything else better to do, The Siege brings in the troops to scour Brooklyn and round up Arab-Americans.
And it is at this point that The Siege stops being a good action movie and starts becoming a preachy lecture on constitutional rights and why they are good. I'm hopeful that Americans have, by now, internalized the notion that concentration camps and military rule are Bad Things, and that the message presented by The Siege really isn't necessary. What we're left with is Willis and Washington screaming at each other, time after time, in a debate that isn't even remotely realistic. Even the last action sequence falls flat, as the Law of Economy of Characters catches up with the movie.
Terrorism is a crazy, mixed up phenomenon, and it shouldn't be surprising that The Siege is a crazy, mixed up movie. To its credit, it deals with the issues of terrorism on a more intellectual level than conventional action movies dare to do -- and in coming with a half-baked, poorly thought out solution, maybe it isn't far wrong in its analysis of the problem. It's an admirable effort that falls just short of being good, which, I suppose, is not a crime.
At least, it's not a crime in the same way that talking during a movie is a crime. Where are the Green Berets when you really need them, anyway?
Rating: B+
--
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
Movie Reviews: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Curtis+Edmonds
Hollywood Stock Exchange: http://www.hsbr.org/brokers/blueduck/
"Tabasco sauce is to bachelor cooking what forgiveness is to sin."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews