By Geno McGahee
Before Steven Seagal was really overweight and making bad straight to video action films, he had a great run of movies. He was an action star and had a huge hit with the follow up to UNDER SIEGE with UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY, a terrorist on a train with only one hope film. It’s DIE HARD on a train.
Casey Ryback (Seagal) is on vacation with his niece, Sarah (Katherine Heigl), after the death of her father. Now this could easily be a sequel to not only UNDER SIEGE but MY FATHER, THE HERO as well. Poor Gerard Depardieu. They took him out and now his daughter is ready to team up with Seagal to take down the terrorists responsible. Perhaps this is not an official sequel to MY FATHER, THE HERO, but you can pretend it is and it fits pretty well.
Casey and Sarah get on a train and are heading to LA for vacation, but Travis Dane (Eric Bogosian) and his crew of mercenaries have taken it over and have hooked up a control center to operate a secret government weapon that can cause earthquakes. Dane shows his power by blowing up a plant in China and then threatens to blow up the Pentagon if he doesn’t get 1 billion dollars.
The passengers are all taken hostage, but Ryback has eluded the capture and is now taking out the bad guys one by one. He teams up with an unlikely partner, as he usually does, in Bobby Zachs (Morris Chestnut), a cook. It becomes a race against time to stop this group and the insane in the brain Dane, and that leads to plenty of beaten up bad guys.
I was happy to see Patrick Kilpatrick back again as a villain. He’s a great bad guy, showing up in many action films. He was a bad guy in SHOWDOWN, BEST OF THE BEST 2, CLASS OF 1999, and ERASER. I don’t think that he could play a good guy and why should he? He is a wonderful villain, but they don’t use him too well here. They don’t even let him have a shot against Seagal. Remember, he was the karate expert in SHOWDOWN. He may have been able to give Seagal some competition, but a knife through the throat by his partner ended that opportunity.
Dane uses Sarah as bait to flush out Ryback. “Your father is not a hero…and neither is your uncle,” he booms (well, maybe not), and Ryback comes in, takes out more bad guys and then has to stop a nuclear meltdown in Washington. This is a Seagal movie…so if you’re betting on Dane to win, you are going to lose your money, but if you bet that he will die in amusing fashion, that is a safe bet.
UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY is great fun with plenty of action. Seagal seems a little detached in it though. It is not his best performance and there really is never a moment where he is in any real trouble. In DIE HARD, there were times when the hero was on death’s door and you felt that he may not make it, but not here. Ryback is shot at one point and then he sorts of forgets about it and forges on. He then has a showdown with the number one bad guy and it’s a mismatch. He just kicks the shit out of him with relative ease. I don’t think that Seagal’s heart was in this one. It was a very good movie, but the performance of Seagal took away from the final product. I highly recommend it, but had he brought his A game, this would have been much more of a standout.
Rating: 7/10
I’m a big Seagal fan, and have been since Above the Law. I also got the opportunity to meet him twice during the early nineties. Once in West Hollywood at his dojo for just a couple of minutes, and once in Las Vegas during a martial arts tournament. Both times he was still married to Kelly LeBrock. Under Seige 2 and On Deadly Ground were his last two really good films before his production company was disolved, and he had to go to Europe to make “straight-to-video” movies. He also put on another fifty pounds or so during that time. I enjoyed his first seven films and consider them to be the best of everything he’s done. Even thought he’s still heavy, I wouldn’t want to piss him off.
I agree! He had a great run, with his last good one being EXIT WOUNDS. That proved he could have been something still but then HALF PAST DEAD happened and the show was over.