The Siege (1998)
Directed by Edward Zwick
The secret US abduction of a suspected terrorist from his Middle East homeland leads to a wave of terrorist attacks in New York. An FBI senior agent and his team attempt to locate and decommission the enemy cells, but must also deal with an Army General gone rogue and a female CIA agent of uncertain loyalties.
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What critics compared The Siege to
Even slight distance in time can elicit amazement, as at the prescience of The Siege (1998), or revaluation of hosannas, as with Titanic (1997) and, in some future, The Dark Knight ; or cooler judgment with regard to last years big winner, No Country for Old Men, more than sold out as one of nine Joel and Ethan Coen features at the 2008 Museum of Modern Art spotlight on Collaborators in the Collection.
But this is a blow-’em-up/shoot-’em-up that takes no prisoners and has a nonexistent moral compass; it makes The Siege, True Lies, and even the entirety of Donald Trump’s tweets look unnervingly astute.
Which, ultimately, is the problem with the disjointed “Love and Other Drugs,” another film from filmmaker Edward Zwick (“Blood Diamond,” “The Siege”), who can be entertaining but wants to be “important.”
A Stanley Kramer for our times, director Edward Zwick has spent much of his career raising social consciousness—about war (Glory, Courage Under Fire, Defiance), terrorism (The Siege), and human exploitation (Blood Diamond)—while lowering pulses.
He co-produced Shakespeare in Love and Traffic; his finest movie as director, Glory, centred on the first black regiment to fight in the American civil war, and later films tackled such subjects as the relationship between Islamic terrorism and excessive national security (The Siege) and the illicit diamond trade in war-torn Africa (Blood Diamond).
During the course of his three-decade career on the big and small screen, he’s tackled racism (Glory), infidelity (“thirtysomething”), homosexuality (“My So-Called Life”), terrorism (The Siege) and Tom Cruise’s savior complex…uh, make that colonialism (The Last Samurai).
After that, director Edward Zwick ( "The Siege" ) tends to get carried away with the slow-motion hero shots of Cruise swinging a Katana blade with passionate, meditative vehemence (while gritting those pearly whites as sweat flies from that pretty mane of hair) in otherwise potent scenes, including an attack on the village that brings Algren and Katsumoto together as allies.
The process by which this evolves, while plodding at times, is tempered by director Edward Zwick ("The Siege", "Courage Under Fire") who admits to being influenced by Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai", and writers John Logan and Marshall Herskovitz.
That being said, "The Last Samurai" is certainly Zwick's most accomplished film as a director, dwelling on many of the same cautionary themes of American militarism that have permeated his previous pictures ("Glory," "Legends of the Fall," "The Siege" and "Courage Under Fire") but finding a means to a more elegant narrative integration.
His last effort, 1998's "The Siege," imagined a United States in which terror attacks have led to martial law, while the film before that 1996's "Courage Under Fire" was one of the first Hollywood efforts to address the Gulf War. "Glory" and "Legends of the Fall" also are on his resume.
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In 1989, director Edward Zwick began his career with the powerful Civil War drama, "Glory," but since then, he has made continuous disappointments, to me at least, with 1994's "Legends of the Fall," and 1996's "Courage Under Fire."
The Films of Edward Zwick Paper Dolls Having It All Special Bulletin About Last Night... Glory Leaving Normal Legends of the Fall Courage Under Fire The Siege (May 23/16) The Siege details the chaos and violence that ensues after terrorists essentially wage war on New York City, with the narrative following a handful of characters as they attempt to stop the carnage by any means necessary.