Verdict
Summary
With action stars, you’ve got to have the perfect marriage of material to the star in question, and if this guy is going to keep going he’s got to get a grip on his persona to best convey his abilities to the audience he’s trying to reach. I think he can do it, but The Siege won’t do him any favors in the long run.
Plot:
A facility in the middle of nowhere suddenly becomes a place where good guys, bad guys, and a whole lot of bullets and blood will collide.
Review:
Exasperated and run down, Walker (Daniel Stisen who will either elate or annoy you as an action star, depending on how you assess his abilities in front of the camera) is an elite government hitman whose latest mission sees him compromised and without a path forward. He licks his wounds and his pride at a remote compound where downtrodden agents and assassins seem to congregate and regroup for their next assignments and / or to pick up their new identities and passports, and Walker takes his huge beard and popping biceps and sets them down on a cot in a dank room where he tries to get some shut eye. Meanwhile, another hitwoman named Elda (Lauren Okadigbo) he’s never met before enters the facility with another woman named Juliet (Yennis Cheung) who is a liability to a terrorist group (or something) who is after her. The terrorist group converges on the facility, infiltrates it, and begins killing all the agents and limited staff within, and Elda and Juliet – despite Elda’s formidable abilities to defend herself – plead with Walker to help them, but Walker is worn out, exhausted, and just wants to be left alone, but when he takes a small wound in the kerfuffle as the shooters invade, he gets mad and makes a tourniquet for his wound and goes on the warpath. They just gone and woke up the bear!
If The Siege had been made between 1989-1995, it might’ve made Norwegian bodybuilder Daniel Stisen a household name in the direct-to-video market for a good decade or so. His previous film Last Man Standing fared a little better than this one, simply because he’s so browbeaten and monotone to the point of being comical here, and he’s hilariously disheveled and dirty looking. He’s a true Viking warrior in this film, and to my eyes he’s wildly out of place as an elite assassin in a dingy looking warehouse location. He’s like the Marv character in Sin City: A relic in a world that no longer needs him, but if he’d been born a few hundreds years earlier, he’d be a king with women at his feet. Stisen belongs in movies, but The Siege is a rough piece of work. It needs a lot of polishing, better scripting, and a much better filmmaker to handle this material and the hulking anomaly that Stisen is. With action stars, you’ve got to have the perfect marriage of material to the star in question, and if this guy is going to keep going he’s got to get a grip on his persona to best convey his abilities to the audience he’s trying to reach. I think he can do it, but The Siege won’t do him any favors in the long run. From director Brad Watson.
Well Go USA will be releasing The Siege to Blu-ray and DVD in a few weeks, so keep your eye out for it. It comes with a making of feature, and the trailer. I caught this theatrically about a month or so ago, and I’m happy to have it in the collection for further studies on Stisen and his persona.
