I seem to remember hating this movie to death when I first saw it about ten years ago. I watched it again yesterday and was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. This either shows how much your opinion can change over time or shows that I missed something the first time around. Or I was a little drunk when I watched it this time. Either way, it’s not as good as the original film, but I’m sorry to say that this is better than the average Steven Seagal movie.

Seagal is right on the money for most of the movie, except for any part where he’s trying to be a good uncle and have a normal relationship with his niece, played by Katherine Heigl. No matter how much I love him, Seagal absolutely can not be a normal guy, and he can NOT do romance. Holy crap, I saw him do a sex scene in one of his movies, I can’t remember which one, but it was like watching a beautiful woman in bed with a rhinoceros.

Seagal reprises his role of Casey Ryback, now retired from the Navy and working as a chef at the charmingly named Mile High Café in Denver, Colorado. He has long since lost contact with his brother, but now that he has been tragically killed, Casey wants to come back into his niece Sarah’s life. Sarah is unimpressed with his long absence, and they do not start their vacation off on a good note.

As they are traveling by train from Denver to Los Angeles, a madman named Travis Dane (a clownish performance by Eric Bogosian) takes control of the train and uses it as his control center for a wild plan to take control of a top-secret government outer-space super-weapon.

OK, so get this. Some Middle Eastern terrorists offer him $1 billion to destroy not New York City, not the White House, but nothing less than the entire eastern seaboard! Now THIS is a bad guy! Say what you will about the rest of the movie, but the plot has all of the villainous ambitiousness of a 1980s 007 film. Dane takes it all in stride, though, even agreeing (for an extra $100 million) to use the satellite to destroy a passenger jet in mid-flight to get rid of one particular man’s hated ex-wife. Personally I’m willing to bet that they could have found some crackhead to off the poor wife for like, you know, maybe $20 million (or another of his henchmen to just do it for free), but no matter, we get the point of that little addendum to the deal. The accuracy on this thing is astonishing.

Early in the film, soon after taking over control of the satellite (which he is able to do because, of course, he designed it but was fired by the government before it was deployed), he demonstrates his control by destroying an alleged chemical weapons plant in China. I loved this part. I’ve been living in China for two years now, and he describes a weapons facility in the city of Guangzhou, which he pronounces “Guang-zoo,” but is actually pronounced “Guang-joe.” Yeah, this is a little nit-picky, and most people wouldn’t recognize the mistake anyway, but for me it’s a little hard to take a super-villain seriously when he can’t even pronounce the names of his targets. And ‘Guangzhou,’ by the way, is Mandarin for “Canton.” It’s not an obscure place!

OK, so we certainly know by now what to expect from a Steven Seagal movie, so I had no problem with the outlandish villain and his nutty scheme. But Eric Bogosian really blew his role. He plays Travis Dane, the man who has taken control of the train and the satellite weapon, with a casual aloofness that completely takes away any sense of tension or danger that the movie might otherwise have had. Throughout his entire performance, he looks like he’s joking his way through an early script reading.

Katherine Heigl phones in her performance but there’s not anything overtly bad about it, although there’s also not really anything good about it. Seagal is showing the first signs of aging in this movie, but still does what he needs to do to make it a fun film. It’s got a good story and some clever comic relief and, despite a couple of botched performances, is still entertaining enough. I’ve heard rumors of an Under Siege 3, and while Seagal is certainly too old by now to do it, it’s not like that’s gonna stop him. I’d watch it…

2.5 Beans out of 5.