From the perspective of 2022, Under Siege sounds ridiculous. Die Hard on a ship, with actors who are better known as memes and caricatures than action stars, feels more like a punchline than a movie. But Under Siege was one of the first Die Hard knockoffs, long before the memeification of Gary Busey and Steven Seagal, and it’s far sleeker and smarter than most of the imitators who followed it. 

The setup is simple: the battleship Missouri is about to be decommissioned and is currently en route to Hawaii. The Captain’s birthday is coming up, and several of the men are arranging a surprise party with a special appearance by Miss July 1989 (remember that these were the days before the internet, when a Playboy Playmate was a big damn deal). Petty Officer Ryback (Seagal), the ship’s head chef, is one of those “unconventional but gets things done” types. He’s promised his captain bouillabaisse, and he doesn’t want someone coming in and messing with the menu. He gets in a fight with one of his superior officers (Busey) and gets thrown in the meat locker until the party’s over. Up until this moment, you could be watching Top Gun on a ship instead of Die Hard on a ship.

But then the first of the movie’s twists kicks in: Miss July 1989 is here, but her entourage for that “surprise party” is not all that they seem. As Miss July changes into her performance costume and chugs motion sickness pills, the band — Bad Billy and the Bail Jumpers — warms the crowd up with some blues. A keen-eyed viewer will have already realized that some of the actors are a bit too famous to just be party entertainment. Tommy Lee Jones is dressed like a strung-out blues rocker, Colm Meaney’s a caterer…something’s up. 

Then Jones steps up to the mic and asks to see the highest-ranking officer in the room. In the space of a few minutes, the captain and his third-in-command are dead, Jones’s buddies have pulled guns on the remaining crew, and the boat is…well. Under siege. Now we have a movie.

“Four minutes ahead of schedule,” Jones says, his musical persona gone. “Damn, I’m good.”

Under Siege has one of the great tropes of action movies for its second twist: the man they’ve locked up in the meat locker is more than a maverick cook — he’s a SEAL with counterterrorism training. Cooking was, essentially, his retirement job. Tommy Lee Jones’s plans are about to go south.

Neither of these twists are spoilers, really, they’re in the trailer. (They don’t make trailers like that any more, and that’s a shame.) Not much about this movie is anything but predictable. But that’s the fun of it. Sometimes you just want to see someone beat the shit out of the bad guys, and Under Siege delivers that pleasure in spades. Tommy Lee Jones is at the height of his Tommy Lee Jones powers, dangerous, funny, and sharp. (No one else could have made That was a bomb, jackass quite so funny.) He improvises a monologue about Saturday morning cartoons that would have been immortalized in a dozen Tumblr gifsets if the movie had come out a few decades later.

As for Seagal, he shows all the reasons he became the multi-million-dollar action star he was before his ego and vices took over: he’s no Tommy Lee Jones, but he doesn’t need to be. He just needs to be charismatic and look good wearing a tank top and punching people. Under Siege isn’t the cat-and-mouse game that Die Hard was — this is more a mongoose taking out a nest of cobras with a very confused adult entertainer along for the ride — but in 1992, that just made the movie feel a bit fresher. (Miss July gets a pretty satisfying arc of her own, to be honest — the back half of the movie puts its “lone hero against the odds” plot aside for one about a ragtag group of renegades working together to save the day, and she gets a moment of greatness before the credits roll. Seagal is still the indisputable star, but it’s fun to watch him give everyone a chance to shine.)

Under Siege was filmed when the formula wasn’t yet a formula, and a Die Hard movie could still feel novel. Seagal is soft-spoken and doesn’t like guns, making him a nice contrast from the Rambo knockoffs of the previous era of American action films. In a lot of ways it has more in common with its Hong Kong contemporaries (I haven’t watched this and Hard Boiled back to back, but I really should). Even now, the movie is a fast-paced, easy, and enjoyable watch, with the kind of clear, easy-to-follow action sequences that are all too rare these days. It’s very silly, but it’s not ashamed of its silliness, and its lean runtime (only 103 minutes!) means it moves fast and doesn’t dare overstay its welcome.

(Let’s be clear: this movie isn’t perfect. There are some dated bits: homophobic language, an extremely unfortunate drag getup, and the usual gratuitous waist-up female nudity that seems to have been required of all action movies of the era. The movie is also infected with the kind of rah-rah patriotism that can wear on a cynical viewer.)

Audiences at the time loved Under Siege, making it over $150 million globally on a $35 million budget and even earning a few Academy Awards for sound design. It did pretty well with the critics, too, getting generally good reviews and holding a respectable 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert summed it up nicely: “I walked into the screening in a cynical frame of mind,” he wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, “but then a funny thing happened. The movie started working for me.” How good is Under Siege? Good enough for three stars from Ebert, and for Harrison Ford to hire director Andrew Davis on the basis of the rough cut. (The hire? The Fugitive, which would once again see Davis working with Tommy Lee Jones.) That’s good enough for any year.