The Siege

This movie is not really about terrorist bombings that only Denzel Washington, Annette Bening and Bruce Willis can stop. It's really about race and racism (which is only the defining issue of America's century), and the nature of hatred, and a massive federal intelligence and armed forces complex looking for an enemy after the Cold War took their raison d'etre away. It advances some fairly complex ideas about these issues, which no thinking person can deny are major factors in the quality of American public life today, and while it does not answer all of them (partially because it is compelled by genre formula to provide some sort of end to the movie), the fact that it even raises these questions is to be commended.

The major questions this movie raises in no particular order are:

• Can a person be held morally responsible for crimes that someone of his color, creed or class has committed?
• What exactly is an appropriate last resort for dealing with terrorism? Does it involve the increasingly deadly application of force at all?
• Are the American military and intelligence operations looking for a new enemy of any form that they can use to justify themselves?
• Why do the American people seem to take so readily to scapegoating fairly random groups of people for problems in America? Why does a significant segment of the American people always answer "yes" to the first question I posed?

The amazing thing about this movie, though, is the way it manages to raise these questions without being terribly heavy-handed or (conversely) oblique about it, which is really hard to do, and still deliver the terrorist-fightin'-movie goods in spades. The scenes that are pure tension builders come off as exemplars of the type: the scene at the beginning of the movie where Denzel Washington is attempting to talk down terrorists who have taken a bus hostage (w/o the funny complications in "Speed"; it's just sitting there) is easily the best hostage scene in the last five years or so (with the exception of "The Negotiator," a seriously underwatched film). Director Ed Zwick gets a whole lot of tension mileage out of very little gore or even that many onscreen explosions. This movie also does a whole lot better at showing the emotional consequences of terror than any other film I can remember, and of course the emotional consequences of having Bruce Willis bring the Army into New York. (Incidentally, it was refreshing to see New York used as the site of the blowups for an actual reason, instead of the fact that it has the most recognizable skyline in the world (cf. "Armageddon," "ID4," "Deep Impact," and frankly "Godzilla")).

Every actor in this movie acquits him- or herself well, with some really outstanding performances, like Tony Shalhoub as the menaced Arab-American FBI agent and Denzel "You So Fine" Washington as his partner who is emotionally responsive to the horror around him but realizes he still has to respond. I was a bit unsure about the choice of casting that put Bruce Willis in the role of the Army general, inasmuch as the Bruce Willis movies I have enjoyed most have featured him in the role of a smart-mouthed NYC cop, a smart-mouthed Chicago FBI agent, and a smart-mouthed LA private investigator, but once I realized that he was here a foul-mouthed casual racist and sexist, I knew he would be perfect in the role.

A final note: this movie has been widely condemned as racist because Arab-Americans do everything bad that starts everything in this movie. This strikes me as somewhat strange, because not only does the movie hammer home at every opportunity the opposition of the Arab-American community to these people's actions, and not only does it feature an Arab-American character as one of the main good guys, but the last third of the movie is basically a massive denunciation of discrimination against Arab-Americans, in that it shows the discrimination in a sickeningly unflattering light. Are civil rights movies that show white people saying "nigger" racist? "True Lies" was a racist movie, through and through, in the way that people say "The Siege" is. The only Arab characters in "True Lies" were fanatic mad-dog terrorists. This movie takes pain after pain to present a broader scope.

I'm not sure whether this movie has successfully rung certain bells that I have in my intellectual consciousness and thus prejudiced me towards it, so I'm not really sure how much anyone else would enjoy this movie. But if you have any interest at all in the questions I noted above that the movie raises, you should probably see it. If you can look past the massive explosions for a moment, you might find an actual intellectual argument there.

Attractive Man Count: And who better to present an intellectual argument than Denzel Washington? 2 for him (special dispensation), 1 for a cleaned-up and merciless Bruce Willis, total 3.

Attractive Woman Count: No major characters, although Annette Bening is a ho, which is almost the same as being attractive to certain men. Some fairly prominent minor characters I will grant a 1.

Overall Grade: If you like issues like this, and like explosions of the best kind, it's a definite A. If you like your movies somewhat dumber, I don't know.

WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE PAID ANYTHING, ANYWAY?

I am trying to cut out this meta-reviewing crap, but I'm still puzzled as to whether the following people watched the movie or not before writing the review:

• Michael O'Sullivan, the new movie reviewer for the Washington Post's Weekend section (who can't hold the old guy's popcorn and Coke), thinks this movie is unsuccessful because Annette Bening's espionage tactics involve being a ho. While not unmindful of this possible flaw, I would assert that making that point the main bulk of one's criticism of this movie is akin to demeriting "Hamlet" because the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are such incredible morons.
• Stephen Hunter, who reviews for the Post's Style section, thinks the point of the movie is that we're supposed to be rooting for Bruce Willis, which is about as laughable a thesis as I can think of and makes me wonder whether he wasn't taking a dump or something during the film's last 30 minutes.
• Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune thinks terrorists aren't capable of bringing New York City to its knees, which makes me wonder whether he reads anything outside of his own section in the Tribune. [I am saddened to note how right I was.]

It frustrates me personally when movie reviewers try to make movies conform to their expectations of them, and then when they don't, they denounce them (except if they are French, because then the expectation is that they won't actually, you know, Like it but that it's a work of Genius). It frustrates me as well when people make other people, or jobs, or anything at all try to conform to their expectations instead of taking them as they are and trying to ferret out good or bad in them, but that's some other forum.

I remain astonished at how prescient, in some ways, this movie was. Though we didn't go where this movie did after September 11, 2001, it took a determined application of will for us not to.

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