Jamie
I often try to reflect on the imprint that the latest BMT films had on the younger me who experienced their release in real time. Jury Duty is a perfect example. Huge in my mind. Tiny tiny in the actual cultural impact. Seagal represents an inversion of sorts. I’ve found that many people have a real connection to watching Seagal films on cable growing up. Something like Under Siege 2: Dark Territory can loom larger in their minds than the original. Not so for me. I don’t know if it was good upbringing or our exquisite taste, but Seagal almost had no actual presence in my mind. I don’t think I had ever seen a Seagal film until BMT… not a starring vehicle at least. Despite now having seen quite a few, we still have a lot to catch up on.
To recap, Ryback is back, Jack! And he’s cutting it up once again. Still a chef (obviously), but he’s a bit sad. His brother died in an airplane crash and left his niece an orphan. It’s all up to him to take care of her, but he hasn’t seen her in a while. He also has to take a train from Denver to LA with her to attend the funeral because she’s now scared of air travel. I’m sure this will be an uneventful train ride for good ol’ Ryback, right? Wrong! That’s because some big bad terrorists are along for the ride ready to hijack an earthquake satellite and hold the world hostage! This is real. This is happening. Travis Dane is the disgraced creator of the satellite who is going to use his big brain to get it back and he’s going to use… dark territory to do it. What’s that? Thanks for asking, it is the area that this train will go through where it won’t be in contact with the operators and they can keep things secret. Anyway, Ryback’s niece is taken hostage and so he recruits a porter, Bobby, to help take down the terrorists one-by-one. And boy, do they. They are chopping them. They are shooting them. They are tricking them. The terrorists are shaking in their boots at the mere mention of Ryback’s name and Ryback is able to help the hostages escape. But with Dane’s haxxors skillz he’s also able to destroy all kinds of stuff and sets the satellite on the Pentagon. With his job done he attempts to escape, but Ryback catches him, destroys his laptop (allowing the government to destroy the satellite), and right before the train crashes is able to jump into a helicopter, leaving Dane to plummet to his death. THE END (or is it? (isn’t it?)).
Boy, this is a tricky one. On the one hand this is an objectively shit film with a terrible plot and a star that cannot act his way out of a paper bag. Seagal was deep into his extended Difficult Period and you can tell. There are literally scenes that make no sense and shouldn’t be in the film, but you get the sense that he insisted and the filmmakers were like “whatever.” His scenes with Heigl are… fraught. There is not a female body that they don’t dare to ogle. All that being said, this is straight-to-video brain candy unleashed on the big screen. It’s kind of the precursor to films like Moonfall and The Beekeeper where you have to admit that there is something to a film that is unabashedly pure entertainment. I’m not going to say it’s good and if I were a serious critic I would be like “no way, no how.” But I’m not. This was fun to watch.
Hot Take Clam Bake! I’m going serious on this one. There is a scene in this film where Morris Chestnut is recruited by Seagal to take on the terrorists and he reacts in disbelief. “But, you’re just a cook!” he exclaims. How does he know this? Well earlier in the film he and Chestnut are cutting it up in the bar area and Seagal tells the bartender not to give Chestnut all the brandy because he needs it to bake a cake. Smash cut to him making a cake in the microwave as Chestnut looks on. This scene is… well, extraneous is probably even being too kind. It’s insane that it’s in a major motion picture. My hot take is that Seagal only clocks the brandy to make it make sense that Chestnut is then watching him bake said cake, which in turn allows Chestnut to gain the knowledge of Seagal’s background. It is entirely constructed because someone, somewhere was like “Wait… how does he know he’s a cook?” It’s honestly beautiful. Hot Take Temperature: Microwave Cake.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *gif of me hanging off the side of a train and totally akidoing people to death* Let’s go!
The Good? I mean … there is kind of an argument here that this is a good Seagal movie. That isn’t saying much, but it is an incredibly wild film. As you watch it you want there to be hundreds of these types of films available. And yet, there isn’t. Out of every 100 VHS releases there is generously one Crackerjack in the bunch. Under Siege 2 is a bad wide release film (an absurdity even), but a VHS rental? An afternoon HBO film? Uh … cha, it does it for me.
The Bad? The film is absurd! The bad guy is absurder! He might be the most absurd actually. Is that a bad thing? Well, depends on your perspective. There is the Seagal of it all, and the harrowing experience of watching him interact with a young woman in the form of Katherine Heigel. But all of the bad can, in a way, be good.
The BMT? I mean, is it the best train film in the BMT canon? Maybe. It is a great train film. And of all the Seagal films when you actually think about it, it might be the third most entertaining. For a trilogy just smashing out Under Siege, Under Siege 2, and Executive Decision (and pretending like they filmed the actual tragic death of Stephen Seagal) is a decent option.
Oh snap, time to continue down the AI analysis journey. Last time I was looking at whether the order of the posters mattered when trying to pull out the ones that feature a clown. This is just about the same analysis, except I just ran 100 permutations, just to see if there was a pattern to when zero, one, or two posters are pulled out:
The green dots are both, the red none, and the black is Quick Change but not Child’s Play 2. The only real pattern is that Child’s Play has to be very near or after Quick Change to be ignored, which is interesting. In the end it does indicate the position mostly doesn’t matter, but you probably want to permute and run more than once to get accurate results. I would also say you should do more posters not less, I think it very much cuts down on the false positives … although maybe if you were looking for something common it would end up having more false negatives or something. I guess I’ll have to test that.
A Kinda Planchet (Who?) for Morris Chestnut who is kind of hapless throughout, but he is integrated into the hero crew™ pretty quickly. I’m going to go with a recently rare Product Placement (What?) for the sweet Panasonic Mash XBS boombox featured in the lone sex scene of the film. I do love the Setting as a Character (Where?) for the titular Dark Territory which appears to be in the Rocky Mountains just west of Denver, I think. Not really any MacGuffins or even twists amazingly. This is one of the most BMT films I’ve ever seen.
Oooooo what can we learn about satellites and dark territories? Find out in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 