Remembered largely as one of the better Die Hard knockoffs that proliferated in the late 1980s and most of the following decade, the 1992 action thriller Under Siege makes almost no pretense of being anything other than what it is. The movie earned the nickname “Die Hard on a battleship” immediately upon release and wears that badge proudly. The film was also designed as a breakout vehicle for rising action star Steven Seagal, and in retrospect more than three decades later, is pretty much the only Seagal movie at all still watchable.

That latter status comes entirely despite the presence of Seagal, who would quickly prove to be an insufferably hateful and toxic personality in real life, and a laughingstock in all his following attempts to be the next great cinema action hero. Under Siege lands in a sweet spot where whatever appeal Seagal seemed to have in his early career hit its apex, just before he’d grow increasingly lazy and pathetic on screen, and before scores of sexual harassment and sexual assault accusations against him would go public.

Even with all the marketing focus on the picture’s headline star, the real heroes of Under Siege are director Andrew Davis and co-star Tommy Lee Jones, who would soon go on to more respectable success in their next collaboration together without Seagal weighing them down like an anchor.

Title:	Under Siege
Year of Release:	1992
Director:	Andrew Davis
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Also Available On:	Blu-ray Hoopla Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Revisiting it again now, I find it a little hilarious just how much of Seagal’s later downturn already starts to manifest even in his most polished production and biggest box office hit. The actor’s early movies, such as Hard to Kill or Marked for Death, were mostly scrappy, low-budget affairs with dumb plots that served as thin excuses to showcase his signature style of hard-hitting, close-quarters martial arts action. Although they received theatrical releases, they really gained most of their attention on cable broadcast and VHS rentals. Under Siege was the film that brought Seagal into the big leagues, with a decent budget for the day and a wide theatrical rollout. However, if you really pay attention while watching, it becomes quite obvious how little Seagal actually does in the movie. He spends a good chunk of the picture sidelined, and most of his screen-time is spent skulking around, setting traps, and telling other people what to do. Seagal himself only has a few very brief action scenes in which he hardly does any fighting, thus setting a course for how most of his later movies would play.

Based on an “original” (I write in scare-quotes) script by screenwriter J.F. Lawton (Pretty Woman, of all things), Under Siege follows the Die Hard playbook very closely. The story features a highly-skilled hero type who, in what’s supposed to be his downtime, gets trapped in a confined location while a terrorist invasion breaks out around him. Being the only person available with any ability to fight back, he then spends the rest of the movie sneaking about and picking off bad guys one by one until an inevitable confrontation with the evil mastermind in charge.

As that hero, Segal plays Casey Ryback, the most awesome Navy SEAL who ever Navy SEALed (even more than Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn!). He’s such an incredible badass, in fact, that he punched out a superior officer who looked at him funny, and as a result got demoted down to head cook aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri. That this is meant to make sense in some sort of movie logic is just the sort of thing you need to take for granted. As the ship is on its last voyage on the way to being decommissioned, a terrorist group sneaks on board and takes the rest of the skeleton crew hostage, conveniently missing Ryback. Their goal is to offload the ship’s supply of Tomahawk missiles, some of them nuclear-capable, and sell them to dangerous foreign nations. Naturally, Ryback’s going to have to stop that. His only help at first is a ditzy stripper (played by Baywatch babe Erika Eleniak) who’d been flown in to entertain the crew and also luckily avoided being captured.

That’s it. That’s really all there is to the movie. The plot plays out exactly as you’d expect it to, given that premise and the availability of Die Hard to use as a template. In the leading role, Seagal is as adequate as he needs to be to keep the ship afloat. He’s a little stiff in the acting department, especially when trying to deliver smartass quips, and seems to be attempting a weird Cajun-ish accent that comes and goes from scene to scene, but he gets the job done and maintains a level of smug machismo that stays just enough on the tolerable end of the action bro spectrum – a scale he’d rapidly tip over in the bad direction going forward.

Everything that works in Under Siege is to the credit of director Davis, a journeyman filmmaker who’d previously helmed Seagal’s debut feature Above the Law, followed by a well-reviewed (if financially unsuccessful) Gene Hackman thriller called The Package. That latter film is where Davis first paired with actor Tommy Lee Jones, who returned here to play lead villain William Strannix, a former CIA operative who was betrayed by the Agency and now wants revenge against America. Davis stages all the suspense and action in a very slick and efficient manner, while Jones hammily chews the scenery, to entertaining results. Gary Busey also has a fun turn, going full-Busey, as Strannix’s loony henchman. The combination of these elements keeps the film moving even as Seagal threatens to drag it down.

Make no mistake, Under Siege is never in the same class as Die Hard. Obviously, it’s derivative. Even beyond that, the action content is light and not particularly inventive. But it works, sometimes in spite of itself, and is still a good time. Davis and Jones would re-team once again the next year, with a much better leading man in Harrison Ford, for The Fugitive, to blockbuster returns and huge critical acclaim.

Miscellaneous Trivia: In addition to the unavoidable Die Hard comparison, when I first saw Under Siege in the theater in 1992, I clocked the “terrorists take over a Navy ship” plot as a copycat of a 1989 book called Win, Lose or Die, an authorized James Bond novel by author John Gardner. I haven’t read that book in many years (though I kind of want to now), and don’t know whether the two are really as similar as I used to believe, but at the time I really felt that Gardner deserved some sort of writing credit or acknowledgement from the movie’s producers.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

Way back during the High-Def Format War, Warner Bros. released Under Siege onto both Blu-ray and its competitor HD DVD in late 2006, utilizing the same soft, hazy, and overprocessed video master for both formats. For the next two decades, that’s as good as things got for this film, until Arrow Video licensed the title for a new 4K remaster, released at the beginning of 2026.

For reasons frustrating to me, Arrow has issued the movie in separate Blu-ray and 4K packages, with no option to buy the two formats bundled together. The Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray comes with just the 4K disc, a booklet, and a slipcover. I expect that a later standard edition will drop the booklet and slipcover but otherwise be the same.

I don’t own the prior Blu-ray from 2006. From what I’ve seen in trailers and screenshots, it seems to be based on a transfer that was already pretty dated even at the time. Arrow claims the remaster was sourced from a new 4K scan of the camera negative and has been approved by director Andrew Davis. For the most part, I think it looks great… with one serious caveat.

The 1.85:1 image is consistently sharp and detailed, with vibrant colors and contrast, and a nice application of HDR. The movie looks like it was made today and shot with modern 4K digital cameras.

Unfortunately, that’s also the problem. The more I think about, the more I suspect this film was “restored” (a term I use hesitantly here) using the same type of A.I. remastering and detail enhancement as controversial 4K discs like True Lies and The Abyss. Perhaps this one doesn’t seem as obvious as those, likely because it benefits from a learning curve in the process. Nonetheless, despite starting with a light texture of it, film grain mostly disappears after fifteen minutes or so and only crops up occasionally afterward, in a way that seems obviously reduced from what was actually photographed. Honestly, I think the disc looks too sharp, too crisp, and too vivid for a mid-budget movie shot on 35mm in 1992.

Most viewers will probably think this is great (as most seem to think of True Lies and The Abyss, which I still see people rave about on social media), but purists may hate it. Personally, I fall somewhere in the middle, as I frankly don’t care that much about Under Siege to be a stickler about it. The disc is better than any previous home video edition and I don’t foresee it being remastered again into a more faithful presentation anytime soon. (Then again, I said that about Arrow’s Blu-ray for William Friedkin’s Cruising and was later proven wrong.)

As is Arrow’s typical policy, the 4K disc provides a copy of the movie’s original Dolby Stereo soundtrack in PCM 2.0 format. However, I expect that most viewers will want to check out the new Dolby Atmos remix first. That’s how I watched the movie. I’m often underwhelmed with Atmos reworkings of older soundtracks, but this one is better than average. It has a fair amount of bass and is moderately enveloping, with occasional plane flyovers, helicopters, and missiles shooting into the height speakers.

Gunfire and explosions are a little weak, but I spot-checked a few scenes in the PCM track and they were pretty similar, so that issue may just be endemic to the original sound effects. From what I sampled, the PCM is also satisfying in its own right.

Bonus features start with a new audio commentary by director Andrew Davis and screenwriter J.F. Lawton. Also new are interviews with the director (20 min.), star Erika Eleniak (14 min.), supporting actor Damian Chapa (18 min.), and visual effects supervisor William Mesa (28 min.). The disc then wraps up with a vintage trailer.

The booklet in the Limited Edition contains an essay by a critic called Vern (just “Vern”) who wrote a book about Seagal, plus a very funny piece of fan-fiction (originally published online) that describes what random characters killed in the movie are thinking about before they die.

Related

• Tommy Lee Jones
  • Batman Forever (1995)
  • A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
• Gary Busey
  • Predator 2 (1990)

Note: Because I’m not yet equipped to take 4K Ultra HD screenshots, all images from the film on this page were borrowed from heavily-compressed trailers I found on YouTube and are used for illustration purposes only.