The siege in fact began months before the movie came out, with pre-emptive protests from the Arab-American community. The storyline of a series of Arab terrorist attacks resulting in the imposition of martial law in Brooklyn — though not until perhaps an hour and a quarter into the hour-and-three-quarters running time — might have been wiser to play up the science-fictional aspect, a future a little farther off than tomorrow. That way the spectacle of an Army-occupied American city (fortified checkpoints, door-to-door searches, barbwired internment camps, third degrees escalating to torture and first-degree murder) would have presented a new way of life rather than just a temporary inconvenience, and the debate within the movie could have widened beyond the intramural infighting and backbiting of the FBI, the CIA, and the U.S. Army (a good idea in any case), and the terrorists, with a little imagination, could have been fingered as, say, Canadians (or with a lot less imagination, Americans of one extremist stripe or another). Science fiction has long offered a well-oiled gateway to present-day realities. Inasmuch, however, as filmmaker Edward Zwick seems determined to make the least possible demands on the imagination, the notion of violent Islamic radicals is of course as readily acceptable as that of violent Army interrogators. And the more reasonable areas of complaint would be the artistic ones of pedestrian plotting, stupefying fallback on action-film clichés (the slo-mo explosion, the slo-mo crash through plate glass, the slo-mo Dirty Harry-style solo heroics of the FBI chief at a hostage standoff), gaudy parade of high-tech gadgets, corrosive abrasive color photography — but why go on? Denzel Washington is as sympathetic as ever, and no more so on account of the bloody nose and cut cheek. Annette Bening, soliciting no sympathy whatsoever, more than holds her own as a modern Mata Hari with a just-slept-in hairdo and a riveting voice in the low register of a Howard Hawks heroine. And Tony Shalhoub as a loyal FBI man of Middle Eastern heritage — equivalent of the Indian scout in a cavalry adventure — rounds out the pivotal trio of top-pro performers, a tight-knit team. Bruce Willis, in the underwritten part of the Army commander, is obliged to rely solely on star power, of which he has a shortage. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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