Five-Star Three-Star Cinema Club #1: The Siege
A few words about prescience
Welcome to the first edition of my new, recurring Five-Star Three-Star column, in which I will be heading out in search of that rare delight: the five-star three-star movie. Inspired by my post about 1996’s Twister, and expanded upon in a follow-up post, the idea here is to build out a canon of movies that are not exactly great, and certainly not transcendent, but are great at being the exact kind of perfect mediocrity you sometimes crave on a Sunday afternoon. These posts will be for paid subscribers, so chip in and join me on the quest (and feel free to recommend movies I should seek out!)
In conceiving this new column, there was one movie that immediately went to the top of my list, though not because I knew whether it would ultimately qualify as Five-Star Three-Star Cinema. I somehow hadn’t really heard of The Siege until a couple years ago. I knew the name. I knew Denzel Washington was in it, so it couldn’t possibly be bad, but I somehow hadn’t read anything about it or its premise. At some. point, though, I stumbled upon a description of the film and its infamous prescience, foreseeing a lot of what happened on 9/11 and in its aftermath. There was no way I wasn’t watching this movie.
Turns out, this is not actually Five-Star Three-Star Cinema, but I’ll get to why a bit later. Directed by Ed Zwick and co-written by Zwick with The Looming Tower and Going Clear author Lawrence Wright and screenwriter Menno Meyjes, The Siege follows Washington’s FBI Special Agent Anthony Hubbard as he races around New York trying to stop a series of terrorist attacks by a group of radical Islamist cells in the city. The notable thing about it is it was released in 1998, several years before the Twin Towers would come crashing down in the most devastating terror attack on American soil. It is pretty much impossible to watch The Siege without thinking about 9/11 and what Wright was able to predict with his journalistically-informed screenplay.