THE SIEGE (42)

Directed by: Edward Zwick

Starring: Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Bruce Willis, Tony Shalhoub

The Pitch: A wave of terrorist bombings in New York leads to martial law being imposed, as the FBI tries desperately to hunt down those responsible.

Theo Sez: A Trojan Horse of a movie, reasonably thrilling for a while then bursting open about halfway through to disgorge a civics lecture on American Values ; it approaches John le Carré territory - secret agents, covert operations - with a Stanley Kramer sensibility, making for results that, however ambitious and serious-minded, often verge on the ludicrous. The biggest problem is its gutlessness, as when it refuses to admit the US government could ever be involved in a plot to kidnap a terrorist leader - even though it's shown us the operation being carried out, and meaningfully inter-cut it with footage of President Clinton vowing to get tough on terrorism (something so illegal can only be the work of Rogue Elements within the CIA - whose leader duly gets an anti-Clinton rant interspersed among his sexist and racist comments, marking him out as a thoroughly bad lot) ; it wants to make serious points about the dangers of militant flag-waving, only without seeming unpatriotic or, god forbid, actually offending anyone. It's a hollow, meretricious film, from the visual and dramatic clichés it constantly falls into, apparently thinking it's being original (a slow-motion aftermath to a big explosion ; a backfiring car sending everyone scurrying for cover on a tense morning ; a tracking-shot down a line of FBI agents On The Job, all at their phones like a line of switchboard operators), to the way it warns against racism but condescendingly makes Shalhoub's (sympathetic) Lebanese cop more corrupt and indisciplined than his American counterparts. What's most annoying - and maybe I'm being jaundiced and pessimistic here, so ignore me if you feel honoured to be living in our post-Cold War, democratic-capitalist age - is the way it seems to be gearing up for a devastating critique of latent totalitarianism but ends up endorsing pretty much everything about "our way of life", warning only about the importance of tolerance and moderation : it's a companion-piece to Zwick's GLORY, a film devoted to the proposition that War is a wonderful thing so long as it's racially diverse and non-discriminatory. It ends, unsurprisingly, as simple-minded action movie, a film where the hero rushes in, as heroes always have, to save the heroine from the villain's clutches : "Let her go!" shouts the hero ; "Move away from the door!" warns the villain ; "Look out, he's got a bomb!" shrieks the heroine. So much for political debate.