Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
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.
The Siege is a prescient political thriller that gains retrospective weight post-9/11, tackling terrorism, civil liberties, and martial law in New York with reasonable ambition. The plot is competent but somewhat formulaic in its procedural beats, juggling too many threads without fully resolving them satisfyingly. Denzel Washington and Annette Bening deliver solid performances, though Bruce Willis feels underutilized as the rogue general. Cinematography is workmanlike TV-thriller territory with nothing visually distinctive. The ending deflates somewhat, wrapping up the moral complexity too neatly after building genuine tension around constitutional rights versus security. Novelty earns a modest bump for its eerily timely subject matter and willingness to implicate American policy in blowback terrorism, which was genuinely provocative for 1998.