Under Siege (1992)

"Die Hard on a battleship." This one is not a classic but light years ahead of the quippy CGI heavy shit we get these days.

Some negatives:

• Dumbest villain ever. The wicked CIA employs an unstable psychopath to do highly risky missions where they don't want to get caught. This is just too dumb to work even in an action. And washed up hippies are just not that intimidating.

• Pretty dumb premise. The terrorists attack, of all things, a battleship with 1800 sailors onboard, and hope nothing unexpected will happen. Again, this just makes the villain seem r-slurred.

• The chick has one of those terrible ultra short haircuts that were a plague in the early 1990s.

• I'm pretty sure that you'd have some difficulty making a phone call while shooting automatic weapons inside the corridor of a battleship.

But it has its moments:

• Steven Seagal actually doesn't suck. He's either not fat or they carefully shot around it. He looks like he knows how to use a knife. And dare I say, he can even do the bare minimum of acting necessary.

• The hero's backstory is actually really clever to make him who he is and put him in the right place at the right time.

• The setting is great for action. The exterior of a warship, especially a really big one, is a bizarre place because it's got multiple levels overlooking each other at steep angles. There's all kinds of ladders and stairs and hatches to get around. This movie takes advantage of that.

• The technology is actually represented pretty accurately, both the old WW2 era stuff and the 1980s Reaganavy refit stuff.

• It's the only fricking movie I've ever seen that acknowledges you can just blow up a nuclear weapon and it won't somehow cause a nuclear explosion. Virtually every movie involving nuclear weapons relies on the audience being dumb enough to think nukes are like gasoline. It takes a Steven Seagal movie to finally not insult my intelligence.

I visited USS Missouri on its farewell cruise that year and it was pretty awesome. But don't take my word for it.

Visit your local Iowa-class battleship museums at Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and Norfolk.