Under Siege

Under Siege is a 1992 American action thriller directed by Andrew Davis. It was a co-production between the USA and France, with Warner Bros., Regency Enterprises, Le Studio Canal+ and Alcor Films involved in production. The main character, Casey Ryback, a former Navy SEAL, serves as a ship's cook on the battleship USS Missouri. When mercenaries led by the traitorous CIA agent William Strannix, who want to seize Tomahawk missiles, take control of the ship, Ryback has to defend it. Ryback is played by Steven Seagal, a 7th dan holder and shihan in Aikikai aikido. He earned his black belt in 1978 in Japan, where he taught in the dojo of his first wife's family. In close combat, according to English Wikipedia, Ryback uses aikido techniques combined with punches and kicks, so aikido does not appear here in its pure form. The hard edge of these scenes is captured by reviewer Grant Watson (Fiction Machine), who says Seagal ably demonstrates his fighting skills in the film, snapping the mercenaries' necks and stabbing them. Chris Bumbray (JoBlo) places the film in the period when Seagal built a screen identity based, among other things, on fight choreography rooted in aikido. We did not find in the sources who choreographed the fight scenes. Early in his career Seagal worked as a fight coordinator on The Challenge (1982) and Never Say Never Again (1983), but the sources do not give him such a role on this film. Ryback's confrontation with Strannix, played by Tommy Lee Jones, includes a knife fight. We did not find the specific knife-fighting style in the sources. In 1995 it was followed by the sequel Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.

Martial arts in this work

Origin

The film is based on a screenplay by J. F. Lawton, written on spec under the title Dreadnought. That title did not go down well with audiences at test screenings, and marketing proposed the title Last to Surrender, which both Lawton and Seagal rejected. Scenes set on the USS Missouri were shot on the museum battleship USS Alabama in Mobile. They were supplemented with footage of the real Missouri at Pearl Harbor, in the Pacific and in San Francisco Bay. A North Korean submarine was played by the submarine USS Drum, and the war room was built in a school gymnasium. The Introvision process, a front-projection technique, was used during filming.

People and martial arts

• Andrew DavisDirector
• Steven SeagalActor — as Casey Ryback· Aikido (real practitioner)