Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995)

All right, guys. Let's admit it. This one is a classic. Say what you will about Seagal but he gave us UNDER SIEGE 1 and 2 and he got sucked out into the clouds in the Stuart Baird thrill-ride EXECUTIVE DECISION. And for these 3 films I'm eternally thankful. I still can't change the channel every time this one comes on. C'mon! Trains, terrorists, Katherine Heigl, Seagal at his most zen-like, and Everett McGill as Penn who uses pepper spray as a breath spray. What's not to like? And a techno-nerd bad guy who looks like a demented cross between Elliott Gould and Tim Curry! With classic lines like "Your safety IS our primary concern. However, if you try anything stupid, Federal Regulations require that I kill you" I'm surprised this thing didn't win the Oscar for best script...lol.

But seriously, with so much testosterone flying around, helped by Basil Poledouris's rousing score, and so much cool train climbing action (over, under, all over) I sometimes wonder if this one isn't even better than the first one - helmed by Andrew Davis. I mean the Eric Bogosian/Everett McGill combo is just as good as the Tommy Lee Jones/Gary Busey combo! And the kill quip by Seagal (after he dispatches McGill) "Nobody beats me in the kitchen" is right up there with some of the best quips in the Bond pictures.

Anyway it's one of the top films of 1995. I have come to the conclusion that you just can't go wrong when using the DIE HARD formula. I have yet to see a bad DIE HARD clone. SPEED, CLIFFHANGER, UNDER SIEGE, SUDDEN DEATH, AIR FORCE ONE, CON AIR, etc. Die Hard on a Bus, Die Hard on a Mountain, Die Hard on a Ship/Train, Die Hard in a Hockey Arena, Die Hard on a Plane, etc.

Fmovies: i love this film. its great fun from the off and stands up to its average predecessor in my honest opinion. alright, the effects aren't exactly top notch, and the cliches and obvious acts and outcomes are predictable, but this is meant to be entertainment, its meant to make us gasp, get us hooked and give us some fun to concentrate on for two hours. Steven isn't exactly the worlds best actor but he puts in a decent effort here and the end result is a thoroughly enjoyable, if not epic or memorable, fable about a train thats been hijacked by ex NASA employees with control of a satelite with a powerful laser, on which Casey Riback - Seagal - happens to be traveling on to some funeral, with his niece who isn't a happy bunny. enjoy!

First a confession - In a dark little corner of my life which some people incidentally think is all of it, I've got time for the work of Steven Segal. You can scoff but some of the most outright disturbingly entertaining movies of the last ten years read like a roll call of his hits. Hard to Kill, Nico, Under Siege, its sequel of which more in a moment, Half Past Dead, Out for a Kill - the man is a cine-alchemist, turning poor, workman like material into solid gold. This is primarily for two reasons. 1)You must be some kind of crazy genius to forge a career with virtually no personality and 2)He is prepared to go further than most stars in the vanity project stakes, in fact next to Segal people like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger and John Travolta look positively reserved and self-conscious. Under Siege 2 has both of these factors at full strength and in some respects this makes 'Dark Territory' (the sub-title is no understatement) the quintessential Segal Experience. He's been everything from a cop to a University professor (no, seriously) but here the great man reprises his role as Casey Rybeck, an ex-Navy Seal, special ops whathaveyou who jacked it in to pursue a career as a navy chef. In the original Siege and I use the word original purely in the context of first film, Segal saved his ship from terrorists when they threatened to ruin his Japanese rice cakes. In the second version, sorry Installment, Segal is taking his niece, who's very good looking indeed on a Colorado rail journey when its taken over by mercenaries lead by an insane computer genius who plans to destroy Washington using a laser in space. Believe it or not this is almost a Ken Loach set-up in comparison to some of Segal's movies but if you were trying to make the most generic action movie imaginable you'd have a hard time beating this movie. In lesser hands we'd be as dead as one of Rybeck's Poterhouse steaks but Segal the alchemist comes to the rescue and delivers 90 minutes of solid ego-mania and it's a joy to watch. Segal followers will know that when the villains find out who he is and his mêlée of specialist combat tactics (Kick boxing, bomb making, weapons expertise, three Michelin stars) they usually start to panic, all except one head villain, usually no.2 to the main villain (see F.Lee Emery and Michael Caine in On Deadly Ground) who is ill-advisedly confident that he can take our hero in the final reel which of course he doesn't. These scenes show us and reassure Segal that he's one total badass, a man to feared and respected and in case you missed the point Segal's side kick (in this case doubling as black, street talking' comic relief) is there to write it on the blackboard for all the slow kids at the back. Siege has many of these moments in which both Segal's niece and sidekick say things like "I guess he's a hero" and in one terrific moment the aforementioned hired help is told by Segal "oh, you're a hero now?" only to be told "No, man you're the hero!". Willis might have cut in with a quip at this stage but the man with the tan doesn't do jokes or indeed anything except fight and deliver lines in his trademark monotone. Segal's so gloriously vain that he can't even allow himself to be dirtied up over the course of the movie. In Die Hard Willis got beaten, blooded up and shot but not so much as a strand of Segal's hair goes out of place the entire time, the dark jacket remaining in place throughout. This is despite such poten

Under Siege 2: Dark Territory fmovies. This is one of the best sequels to Steven Seagal. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory is not your ordinary hijack-action-adventure films. Since I do like trains, this movie was a plus for me. The part in this film was everyone, including Ryback(Seagal) got to be part of the action. His niece Sarah, played by Katherine Heigl, knew how to fight back. Bobby Zachs, played by Morris Chestnut, didn't shy away from the action, unless he saw Ryback kill one of the hijackers. The funny part was when one of the female passengers flashed her cleavage saying she "broke her bra", the perfect distraction to the hijacker. Great cast, great action, and a great plot I say. I don't care for the critics' opinion, I just liked this movie the way it is! Rating 3 out of 5 stars. 8 out of 10!

A high water mark in the career of Mr Segal. He returns to the screen as the, unflappable, invincible, ice cool, ultra hard Casey Ryback. See him leap from a speeding train, rock climb, roll in dirt, take bullets in the arm, all without putting a mark on his immaculate black suit. No messing about with drawn out fight scenes against a super hard villain, everyone is dispatched with minimum of effort as no-one is anywhere near as hard as Casey Ryback. No-one is more entertaining as to watch as the one man army than Segal. If you watch this film expecting an intellectual script and fine acting then you will be disappointed. But if you expect that from any all out action film I expect you are a fool. Totally over the top, totally unbelievable but a total blast.

Since 2001 Seagal has been quite happy to let his film career crash and burn while he sings the blues and does all his strange little things in his personal life (have you ever tasted his wine or his energy drink?). But there was a time in the 90s when his name guaranteed you an hour and a half of broken bones, severed limbs, bad guys in agonizing pain and a showdown with a head villain who stands no chance against the awesome hurricane force that is Steven Seagal.

I never really like the first Under Siege. I found it to be too low key and slow and after enjoying such brain-free fare as Marked for Death and Hard to Kill in my youth I had come to expect a tougher movie than the what we were given (though the tyrannical BBFC cut the film to shreds and denied me what I wanted to see). I was dismayed at the lousy 15-rating and not even Erika Eleniak's boobs could cheer me up (she's blonde-not my thing).

Flash forward to July 1995 and the awesome poster for Under Siege 2 started showing up in cinema lobbies. It featured the impassive one clinging to the side of a burning train hurtling through the countryside and featured, quite frankly, the best subtitle of any sequel ever 'Dark Territory'. This time it was rated 18 which meant I could look forward to all the blood and gore that the first Under Siege lacked. Obviously I couldn't see this film in the cinema, being only 15 and all, so I had to wait until the video came out in early 1996. By that point the BBFC (those people from the dark-ages again) had censored every last bit of red stuff to the point where it could be shown on the friggin' Disney Channel if it weren't for the swearing.

I would have to wait until 1999, when I bought the uncut US version on DVD, to see the film in it's entirety. And when I did it was like watching a brand new movie.

Casey Ryback, now the head chef of the Mile High Cafe in Denver, had retired from the Navy but still works for the government doing the odd secret mission here and there. When his brother is killed in a plane crash he takes his niece Sarah (the lurvley Katherine Hiegl) on a trip to LA on the Grand Continental, but that particular train just so happens to be hijacked by crazed computer genius Travis Dane and his band of menacing mercenaries featuring dead-eyed Everett McGill and the sleazy Peter Greene. He has a beef with the government and is only too happy to use his skills to blow the Pentagon off the face of the Earth and collect a nice paycheck from the Saudis.

Luckily for Ryback, he was momentarily absent when the hostages were rounded up as he nipped into the kitchen to bake a cake. He teams up with naive porter Bobby Zachs (Morris Chestnut, bringing life to an otherwise ordinary sidekick role) and begins his skulking, lurking mission through the shadows and voids of the train to pull the brake and free the hostages. Do these nasty people really think that they stand a chance against Ryback's awesome power and apparent invincibility? Sit back and watch them get annihilated with a variety of improvised mêlée weapons and other gruesome tools.

The train is a better setting than the boat. This time instead of a plain black backdrop we've got lots of pretty scenery and the constant forward motion of the loco gives the movie a nice momentum. Basil Poledouris' score soars miles above Gary Chang's bland notes of the first one and it honestly ends up being one of the best scores ever and a perfect example of how action music ought to be. And don&