Under Siege 2: Dark Territory

After blowing all the budget on an overblown opening, set in, woah! Space! The makers were already over par. This was probably due to be some big star vehicle - Willis, Stallone, Schz...Arnie....but after that spacey intro, the makers decided that they couldn't afford the $20m fee for one of the big guns.

So, they called up the C-List Action Hero agency and got Steven Seagal - possibly in his last role without the medicinal corset. Add to that, they ruined production of the Penelope Pitstop live action adaptation by stealing the guy that was set to play The Hooded Claw and gave him an even camper role, and selected the rent-a-henchman during a game of darts.

"Tell me straight, do these curls suit me?"

It then moves onto Seagal saying "Hi" to his chef chums - just as a plot device for later, you see, before he heads on down to the train station to meet the daughter of his dead brother....meanwhile, Curly McBaddie and his crew are waiting to hijack the train further up the line with a plan to take over the mega laser thing you saw in that flash opening and destroy Washington DC - a scheme being bankrolled by some, ooo, controversial, Middle Eastern terrorists.

Space Laser? Washington DC? Wait a minute! Okay, so they've "borrowed" this bit from "Diamonds Are Forever"......Curly is no Blofeld though....and Seagal is no Bond....in any shape or Bondform.

What follows next is a mess. It seems that the original script must have been deleted and that it was reconstructed using the action movie cliché tombola.

Terrorists take over a train that just happens to contain the following:

1. Disposable scientists that hold the codes to some global destructo weapon.
2. An ex-Navy Seal, now a chef, from the school of MacGuyver.
3. Obligatory girl without brains.
4. Gung-ho cannon fodder.
5. Rent-a-sidekick
6. A blues band

And the terrorists just happen to have:

1. A leader presumed dead who happened to design the weapon.
2. Navy Seals gone bad
3. Obligatory bad girl
4. Badly trained henchmen.
5. Cardboard bullets
6. A mobile barbershop quartet

And so it goes....Seagal picks off the bad guys one by one like The Predator, cheats death twice, manages to use the chef plot device from earlier to send a message, actually leaves the train and catched up in a less than dramatic chase, manages to stop the bad guys scheme temporarily, before he eventually saves the day.

Its pony. It really is. The final scenes are surely taken from the 1994 Hornby Convention when disaster struck and someone dropped a match on a papier mâché hill. Even for 1995, the effects are poor. And Steven Seagal doesn't run, he kind of strides slowly. Which makes his survival at the end even less convincing.

Oh well, this train wreck of a movie spared us Under Siege 3: Cruise Control.

Um....

2/10