It’s been years since I’ve watched Steven Seagal’s only masterpiece, Under Siege. Luckily, the 1992 classic will be available with a Netflix subscription on November 6, and I plan on watching ASAP. It’s the one and only Seagal movie that is truly worth appointment viewing, and that’s for quite a few reasons, like the bonkers cast, the really cool shooting location, and, of course, Seagal at his physical peak (he’s a long way from that today). It should be, in my opinion, considered one of the best action movies of the 1990s.
Start With The Cast
You really have to kick this conversation off with the incredible cast of Under Siege. It’s rare that there are any other stars in a Seagal movie other than Seagal himself. That’s not true here. Instead of a faceless villain, we get Tommy Lee Jones as William Strannix, a former CIA operative with a serious case of narcissism. Jones is amazing in the role, as he so often is as a bad guy. The scene with Strannix eating roast beef with a chef’s knife is peak ‘90s cinema. Usually, Seagal’s foes are two-dimensional, but not here.
Playing Strannix’s sidekick is none other than Gary Busey. Sure, Busey doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in 2026, but in 1992, he was still thought of as a great actor, and he’s great here. He’s weaselly and slimy, and so easy to hate. He’s more hateable than Jones, that’s for sure. He’s actually perfect for the role at this point in his career. He’s a little crazy, but not too crazy, and it pays off on screen.
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The Movie Was Shot On The USS Alabama
One of the movie’s coolest aspects is its setting. At its heart, Under Siege is a heist movie, and Strannix and his band of thieves are targeting missiles on the USS Missouri, intended for the black market, hoping to spark World War III. In that respect, Strannix is basically a Bond villain trying to pull off an audacious crime to set in motion huge global changes. While shooting on the actual USS Missouri, one of the most decorated battleships in US Naval history, would have been tough to set up, they did shoot much of the movie on the USS Alabama, a retired World War II ship.
The Alabama and the Missouri are different class battleships, but they were both built just before or during the war, and are pretty similar. In a normal Seagal movie, you’d expect the whole thing to be filmed on a soundstage in Burbank, but not this one. They used a real ship, and it makes all the difference in how the movie looks. You really feel like you’re on the Missouri in this, and you believe that Seagal’s character, Casey Ryback, is a former Navy SEAL.
Seagal is really at the peak of his powers in Under Siege. He was coming off a wildly successful string of lower-budget action movies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and he was ready for a big-time movie. In a lot of his later films (including Under Siege 2), he’s simply not believable as an unstoppable force, but he is in Under Siege, for sure. Though he’s been out of the spotlight for a long time, I do love going back to those early movies and remembering why Seagal was great and considered one of the biggest action stars of the ‘90s. Under Siege is the number one reason for that.