A Sluggish Siege

2 stars

A hitman hired to kill an informer gets his target but lets a witness escape. He goes to a secret bad guy facility where he can get a new identity, down to a new set of fingerprints, but he has to wait 24 hours before the new him is ready.

Meanwhile, in the same secret facility, the pregnant girlfriend of a powerful mob boss is hiding out as part of a plan to get away from the baby daddy’s clutches. Unbeknownst to her, the mob boss has sent a squad of killers to bring her back alive, with orders that they leave no witnesses behind. 

It’s not exactly the most original plot. Still, it should be enough framework to hang a decent action movie, provided the director keeps things moving rapidly to keep the audience from overthinking. It helps if you have a leading man with enough charisma and badassery to give viewers something to cheer about. An over-the-top bad guy, someone for viewers to hate until the good guy can get him, is also necessary,

The Siege, directed by Brad Wilson (Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop), has none of these critical elements. The action is predictable, and the acting is pedestrian; the extremely muscular good guy (Daniel Stisen) stumbles from scene to scene, mumbling his lines to the degree that makes Schwarzenegger’s Terminator sound positively Shakespearian. For all the shooting, stabbing, punching, and kicking he does in the film, Stisen is surprisingly lethargic in The Siege. And a dull leading man is the last thing an action movie needs.

The bad guy in The Siege is virtually non-existent. There are a few scenes of him yelling into the phone at his henchmen, but bad phone manners do not a supervillain make. The henchmen are equally bland, only distinguishable from each other by their fashion foibles, bad haircuts, or inept posturing.

Rounding out the cast of The Siege are the bad guy’s girlfriend, Juliet (Yennis Cheung), and her protector, Elda (Lauren Okadigbo). Both actresses try to be more than eye candy and, for the most part, succeed despite the script’s limitations. If the filmmakers had taken out the mumbling male toxicity of Stisen’s character and focused on Juliet and Elda fighting to escape the bad guys, The Siege would have been a lot better.