Once Again, Seagal On The Spot To Save World
With his world-weary squint, several Supermen’s worth of slickedback hair and a voice that rarely rises above a craggy whisper, Steven Seagal is an action-hero to gratify the wildest middle-aged male fantasies of indestructibility.
In “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory,” the sequel to his runaway hit of three years ago, the actor’s invincible alter ego, Casey Ryback, returns to do battle with Travis Dane, a monstrous computer nerd portrayed with a grinning, glassy-eyed relish by Eric Bogosian.
Most of the action takes place on the Grand Continental train, as it speeds from Denver to Los Angeles. Early in the film, which opened Friday, Dane and a band of mercenaries hijack the train and turn it into a computer command center. From there they seize control of a U.S. satellite armed with a particle destroyer that Dane, a former government scientist, invented before he was fired.
Talk about disgruntled former employees! Dane has made a deal to sell the device to some unnamed Middle-Eastern leaders for a billion dollars. But before turning it over to them, he plans to destroy Washington by blowing up a nuclear reactor in the Pentagon. Lucky for us, Casey happens to be on board the train with his spunky teen-age niece, Sarah (Katherine Heigl).
The premise of “Under Siege 2” is almost identical to that of its predecessor, in which the battleship Missouri is hijacked with plans to blow up Honolulu. Only the setting has changed from sea to rail and the target relocated.
Casey, assisted by a railroad porter (Morris Chestnut) whom he teaches to shoot a gun, works miracles against an impossible deadline. The movie culminates with a train collision that is as unsatisfying as it is excessively fiery.
Although “Under Siege 2” isn’t credible for a single moment, its director, Geoff Murphy, has done a smoothly efficient job of coordinating the action sequences. Bodies regularly fly off the train into seething gorges or are ground into hamburger under the wheels.
Barely breaking into a sweat and allowing not one strand of his hair to become unslicked, Casey leaps from car to car atop the train, clings to the side of a cliff by his fingernails and does hand-to-hand combat with Dane’s sadistic partner, Penn, (Everett McGill).
In the moral universe of this fiercely anti-intellectual movie, the bad guys think and the good guys act. That’s why Bogosian, with his drill-instructor’s voice, gets to utter most of the screenplay’s coherent sentences and to do an imitation of Rod Serling.
“I’m going to make the Bhopal disaster look like a Girl Scout picnic,” he announces, as he is about to test his supertoy by blowing up a chemical weapons plant in China. Chortling over what might happen if he took aim at California’s earthquake faults, he boasts, “In 15 seconds Arizona could be beachfront property.”
Informing his former bosses of his plans to destroy Washington, he sneers: “I was smarter than you before I was there. I was smarter than you while I was there. And I’m smarter than you now. Au revoir.”
That’s about as smart as “Under Siege 2” ever gets.
xxxx “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory” Location: East Sprague and North Division cinemas Credits: Directed by Geoff Murphy, starring Steven Seagal, Eric Bogosian, Katherine Heigl, Morris Chestnut and Everett McGill Running time: 1:40 Rating: R