The Siege (1998) * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
"The Siege" does the one thing in a movie that I find inexcusable: it stacks its deck. Meaning that it is contrived to have an easy way out of a problem where there isn't one. Instead of taking their very interesting basic idea and following it through to its logical conclusion, the filmmakers cheated. They gave us an easy, disposable bad guy where there should not have been one.
The film's premise is if nothing else timely. It features Denzel Washington as an FBI agent who grapples with the presence of a set of terrorist cells in New York City. These guys mean business: they thumb their nose at negotiations, blowing up a bus midway through what looks like a possible end of a standoff. They want the release of an Iraqi cleric, kidnapped covertly by the U.S. and being held in secret by the army.
Denzel almost immediately runs into "Elise" (Annette Bening), a CIA operative who either knows a lot more or a lot less than she actually does, and the two of them engage in a very tough-minded tug of war over possible leads and sources of information. The scenes between them are sharp and convincing; someone did their homework about how the Palestinians wind up being the middlemen in everyone's intelligence game. Bening in particular is very good, always smiling when she shouldn't.
But then the movie begins to step wrong with the introduction of General Deveraux (Bruce Willis), who is brought in when martial law is invoked, and proceeds to set up internment centers for suspected terrorists. The parallels are obvious: they're trying to invoke the same sense of shame as when the U.S. interred Japanese- and German- Americans. But it doesn't work this time, because the movie attempts to switch tracks on us and have the Willis character be the obvious villain: Get rid of him and the story's over, and in fact that's more or less what happens.
Why did this annoy me? Because it's dishonest: if the movie had simply been a procedural along the lines of "The Peacemaker", it would have been a more than passable thriller. But instead it mixes its messages. The Willis character is supposed to be, I guess, a warning about how America is often its own worst enemy, but that gets buried by the lockstep plotting that demands he be an off-the-shelf bad guy.
There's a lot of good things in the movie. They're just short- circuited. Tony Shalhoub, for instance, is fine as a Palestinian- American FBI agent, but the movie tries to force points when his son is thrown in the internment centers. And I mentioned Bening, and Washington is always watchable, even in a movie like this, and there's plenty of glossy-looking photography and production design. But by the fatally rushed ending, I couldn't concede that all this did much more than make a deeply flawed movie into a merely bearable two hours.
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