The Siege (M)

Cast: Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Bening

Director: Ed Zwick


What if, asks The Siege in its provocative premise, the terrorist threat to America really hit home. What if Beirut came to Brooklyn? What would happen if sending in the marines meant rounding up entire Big Apple neighbourhoods and interring anyone whose race and religion made them a terrorist suspect?

Well, as the raw material of a contemporary political thriller that might seem intriguing enough. And it has a certain resonance at a time when the United States is happy to wage an undeclared war on Iraq, an action likely to make it even more vulnerable to stateside terrorism.

But it's a movie still out to thrill. So inevitably whatever points it scores - about bungling US foreign policy provoking such events, about how loss of civil liberties under martial law effectively means a victory for terrorists, and how not all Arabs are crazed suicide bombers - they are all overshadowed by the need for speed, explosive spectacle and star turns.

It starts out, however, as a pacy FBI detective story with Denzel Washington's taskforce leader investigating an escalating series of bombings in New York. Soon enough there's the traditional jurisdictional clash, only not with the local cops but with the CIA which seems to be ignoring the rule book about domestic duties. Annette Bening's shifty spy, a Middle East expert, seems to know more about the bombers and their cryptic demands than she lets on.

Then all hell breaks loose, and in comes the Army to weed out the terrorists by putting an entire Arab-American community in an internment camp.

Trouble is, the movie was going just fine until the guys in the camo gear showed up. From there, however, the convolutions get increasingly unlikely and its credibility isn't helped by Bruce Willis's tough-nut Army general who comes on like a glowering mannequin for a military surplus store.

But there's good support for the solid Washington from Tony Shalhoub as his Lebanese FBI partner. He might be carefully scripted to stop this being an exercise in Arab-bashing but he offers both a sense of outrage and humour. And Bening delivers a better class of spook than you usually get in these things.

But The Siege suffers from its weighty ambitions, its need to make the occasional speech about The Constitution, a severe meltdown of plot logic toward, and an end scene which will leave any who saw Washington in the great Crimson Tide, with serious deja vu.

Director Zwick has done issues-driven war movies before in Glory and Courage Under Fire, and he's already copped flak from American Islamic groups for this, despite his efforts at countering the usual Hollywood depiction of Arabs. He tries hard to answer those what-ifs.

Unfortunately, the result is a mildly exciting movie that means well but ends up meaning not much at all.

-- Russell Baillie, Weekend TimeOut