Mutant Reviewers from Hell do
"It's easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. What's hard is choosing the wrong that's more right."

1998 R / Suspense Drama Directed by: Edward Zwick Starring: Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Bruce Willis

Tagline

An enemy they can't see. A nation under siege. A crisis they can't control.

Summary Capsule

Terrorist attacks rock New York as the FBI and CIA scramble to track down the architects. Meanwhile, public unrest and political jitters push the possibility of instituting martial law on the city.

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Al's Rating: Wearing kid gloves in a prize fight.
Al's Review: Insurgent fanatics. Terror attacks on buses and buildings. Politicians and military brass struggling with the line between the national security and personal privacy. The Patriot Act. REAL ID. Camp Casey. Code Pink. Today, these are daily headlines, familiar topics that pervade nearly every aspect of our life and have for over half a decade. It’s even difficult sometimes to remember what our personal perceptions and daily lives were like without them. But, once upon a time, in the long long ago of 1998, these things were unheard of, just exotic terms and ideas to help Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis play What If? in movies like The Siege.

"We’re lucky enough not to have experienced this movie’s nightmare scenario, but falling buildings and exploding buses aren’t quite as fun as they used to be."

In The Siege, Denzel Washington stars as Anthony Hubbard, an FBI agent desperately tracking a string of terrorist attacks by radical Islamists in New York City. While the clock ticks and the Big Apple starts to stew in racial tension, he finds himself stuck locking horns with other agencies who all want to bring down the perpetrators for themselves, first running up against CIA operative Elise Kraft (Annette Bening), then later Major General William Devereaux (Willis). He and his Arab partner, Frank Haddad (Tony Shaloub), have to maneuver themselves through the bureaucracy and interdepartmental politics as fast as they can, before the increasingly anxious government and public move closer to making a rash and dangerous decision.

It’s a well done piece of summertime cinema, but the world has turned quite a bit in the last nine years and what was once an interesting, semi-topical flight of fantasy has become something that, while still disturbing, is now noticeably out of sync with real life, relying on facts and protocols from an America that no longer exists. This is no fault of the movie, of course, it’s just distractingly outmoded by what I see as three major changes:

1) 9/11. Duh. We’re lucky enough not to have experienced this movie’s nightmare scenario, but falling buildings and exploding buses aren’t quite as fun as they used to be.

2) The Department of Homeland Security. The internal headbutting between the CIA and FBI that drives most of the film’s first hour wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) exist anymore in this sort of situation. The DHS has changed so much of how our government functions on these matters that a lot of what goes on between Denzel and Annette Bening just doesn’t apply.

3) Monk. Tony Shaloub’s Emmy makes it impossible for me to take him seriously with an Arab accent. Sorry, Tone.

Now, these changes don’t stop the movie itself from working, mind you, but they do take you out of the film when you see something that just isn’t quite… right anymore. Perhaps strangest of all, the film has taken on a dimension of naiveté about its subject matter. It preaches vigilance, tolerance, and cooperation when dealing with this kind of cowardly attack, and it does so wearing its most seriousist face, but the plot and the style just doesn’t sell it the way it needs to these days. The story bounces along briskly, hitting all the right beats and taking all the expected/unexpected twists that popcorn suspense films are designed to, but, since September 11th, it’s simply no longer good enough. The action sequences are almost jaunty in their execution and the little meet-cute flirtations between Denzel and Annette just feel disrespectful. Again, I lay no blame on the filmmakers, but it doesn’t make it any less true. It’s a movie about terrible events made by people who haven’t had to experience them but, for a long time to come, will only to be seen by those who have.

The Siege is an interesting relic from a time when only half the world would admit to hating the US and the television media shunted foreign policy to the last ten minutes of the nightly news in favor of spending more time figuring out what ‘is’ was. Way back then, this was a film that was fun and cautionary, the sort of thing you enjoyed while you watched it and that made you think enough to give you a conversation that lasted the whole car ride home. Today, it’s a piece of nostalgia that is trying it’s hardest to talk on a college level about what it only knows from high school courses. It’s not a bad film — for what it is, it’s actually a rather good film — but we’re not those people anymore. We know more and recognize better what’s going on in the rest of the world, and have taken longer strides toward learning where we stand in it. It’s a positive thing, no doubt. A part of me, though, can’t help remembering when I saw The Siege for the first time with a smile on my face and popcorn stuck in my teeth. I can’t do that anymore.

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a hamfisted, preachy message! Hudson Hawk goes militant… …and he’s not giving back the sign until we buy more copies of The Return of Bruno.

Didja Notice? [some sources: IMDb]

• Denzel’s nosebleed opening back up midspeech after the bus bombing?
• The intentionally exotic terms they toss around like ‘Sunni,’ ‘jihad,’ and ‘Qur’an?’
• Tony Shaloub’s accent? I’m sorry, I really just can’t deal with it.

Is It Worth Staying Through End Credits?

No.

Groovy Quotes

Agent Hubbard: Remember Oklahoma City? The first 24 hours are the only 24 hours.

Elise Kraft: [to Hubbard] I tend to be suspicious of all true believers. Present company included.

Agent Hubbard: London. Paris. Athens. Rome. Belfast. Beruit. We're not the first city to have to deal with terrorism. Tel Aviv. The day after they bombed the market in Tel Aviv the market was open and it was full. This is New York City. We can take it.

Elise Kraft: It's easy to tell the difference between right and wrong. What's hard is choosing the wrong that's more right.

General Devereaux: The Army is a broadsword, not a scalpel. Trust me, Senator, you do not want the Army in an American city.

General Devereaux: Make no mistake, Senator. We will hunt down the enemy, we will find the enemy, and we will kill the enemy. And no card-carrying member of the ACLU is more dead set against it than I am. Which is why I urge you — I implore you — do not consider this as an option.

General Devereaux: This is the land of opportunity, gentlemen. The opportunity to turn yourselves in.

Soldier: Get out of my face, Hubbard, or I might just decide you're an Ethiopian!
Agent Hubbard: You know, you’re stupid enough to think that that's an insult.

Agent Hubbard: What if what they really want is for us to herd our children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law; shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture [a suspect], General, we do that and everything we have fought, and bled, and died for is over. And they've won. They've already won!

General Devereaux: Are you questioning my patriotism?
Agent Hubbard: I am questioning your judgment!
[pause]
General Devereaux: I am here serving my President, and quite possibly not in the best interests of our nation. My profession does not allow me to make that kind of distinction.

DVD Review

The ‘Martial Law Edition’ DVD came out earlier this year. It’s got a commentary by the director and writer that deals with a lot of the issues in the movie from a post-9/11 point of view, though in parts it almost seem a bit self-congratulatory that they successfully predicted a New York terrorist attack. Also included are an old ‘making of’ featurette and two brand new ones that deal with the renewed interest in the film since 2001.

If you liked this movie, try these:

• Syriana
• Conspiracy Theory
• Die Hard With A Vengeance