American Siege is about a trio of young adults who take a poor man's Morgan Freeman hostage and call the cops in. Why would they do that? In the ensuing siege, local sheriff Willis and his deputy, played by Wayne Gretzky's son, look to find out what's going on. There's a connection with a poor man's Robert Knepper who runs the town, and when Willis can't end the siege, the poor man's Knepper calls in Johnny Messner, acting as a poor man's Jon Hamm, who runs a white nationalist group that does clean-up for for the poor man's Knepper from time to time. Will our man Willis figure everything out before it all blows up and the FBI comes in to take everyone down?
Ty and I were in agreement that we thought this wasn't bad. The trio of hostage takers were interesting characters, that we cared enough about to see how they came out of this; and Willis was fun as the sheriff, especially when he gets fired and does the lonely walk down the street a la Bill Bixby at the end of a Hulk episode. Now it is important to note that the story is a bit all over the place--okay, maybe a lot all over the place, to the point that I still don't know if I fully got it--but at 90 minutes, with some fun characters and performances, that helps deal with the Popsicle Headache that comes with the plot confusion. Also interesting for me as a hockey fan, we have Wayne Gretzky's wife Janet, and his son Trevor. It's maybe not something you want to go too far out of your way for, but if you're looking for some of these Willis films to be a good time waster, this one will do the job for you.
This is now 13 Willis films on the site, but by my count this is only the third of the 12 Willis flicks we've covered on the podcast that has a review so far, which means there's a lot more of him we could be seeing on the site. If you look at the other two, one was White Elephant, which was a Jesse V. Johnson film co-starring Olga Kurylenko and Michael Rooker, so that had more going for it; and the other was Vendetta, with one of my favorite actors, Theo Rossi. There aren't many others that have hooks like that--maybe the ones that have Johnny Drama, aka Kevin Dillon, plus Paradise City with Travolta and Stephen Dorff--so it's possible a lot of them will just be for the pod. The thing is, while some, like this one, are serviceable, most are slogs, and as slogs they're fun for Ty and I to discuss on the podcast, but are they worth me covering on the site when there are so many other things to review out there? Probably not, but you never know when life gets busy and I'm hard up for a film to draft 8 paragraphs on, these Willis films will do in a pinch. That could be how he gets enough tags to end up in the Hall of Fame, my life gets too busy to ignore the low-hanging fruit of reviewing his movies that I've already seen.
You're probably wondering who that poor man's Jon Hamm is. It's none other than Johnny Messner! What we didn't know at the time is Messner does a lot of these Willis-EFO flicks, but as far as we can tell, this is the only one where he plays a poor man's Jon Hamm. In a film full of poor mans's, seeing a favorite of the blog remake himself in the form of a poor man's is something I don't know if we've ever encountered here on the site, but I'd say if you were going to make yourself into a poor man's anyone, Jon Hamm would be a good one to choose. Interesting fact between those two: Messner was born on April 11, 1970 (fellow Aries!), and Hamm was born less than a year later, on March 10, 1971 (a Pisces, like my wife Jen). There are still some of Messner's films from when he wasn't a poor man's Jon Hamm, but rather Johnny Messner action lead, that we still need to do, including the Dolph flick 4Got10, so we'll see if we get some more of those in as well as these smaller parts in recent Willis DTV flicks.
A lot of these new Willis films take place in the South--and the ones that don't take place there are still shot there. It makes sense, it's cheaper, and then with COVID, there were fewer restrictions too. A side result of this is we get characters with exaggerated Southern accents, which for Todd Gaines as a Georgian hurts his sensibilities, but as card carrying Northeasterner, I almost feel like the exaggerated accent is part of the charm. It's like Gone with the Wind sans the racism. Of course, growing up an hour or so north of Boston, I get it too, with every Hollywood actor excited to drop their Rs to sound like my relatives. The only thing is, you can't shoot Willis-EFO flicks in Boston, it's too expensive, so if they had ever decided to make one that took place there, we'd have drone shots of Fenway, the Zakim Bridge, and the Pru, while everything else is shot in Birmingham, Jackson, or Fitzgerald, Georgia--where this was filmed.
Another part of my card-carrying New England upbringing is a love of hockey. As a kid, we played baseball in the summer, and as soon as the pond froze, we switched over to hockey. As a Bruins fan, we loved Bourque and Neely, and with the lack of national games on TV like we have today, we saw Wayne Gretzky twice a year--and one of those would be in Edmonton, so I was usually asleep before the game ended. The Gretz was it, there was nothing like him, but I remember one game he played at the old Garden where he got into it with some of the Bruins and ended up in the penalty box. Cheering with my dad, his friend, and my friend, it solidified my Bruins fandom, united against the best player in the league on the best team making their one visit to Boston that year, and that greatest player spending two minutes in the Sin Bin. Later, the Gretz left Edmonton for greener pastures, LA, in part so his wife, Janet, could pursue an acting career, which led her here, to this EFO-Willis flick, along with their son, Trevor; but that move to LA had a lasting legacy on the NHL, as teams popped up all over warmer climes, in places like Miami/Sunrise, Tampa, Carolina, Dallas, Phoenix, Anaheim, and now Las Vegas, who just won the Stanley Cup. It's not the NHL I grew up with back then, where we had the Whale in Hartford and the Nordiques in Quebec, and while both of those cities remain teamless at the same time Phoenix is playing in a 4000-seat arena because no one there cares, or we have a final four in last year's playoffs of Vegas, Dallas, Carolina, and Florida, Gretzky still remains the greatest to ever do it, and I was lucky to see him play, if only on TV, before he moved to LA and created a ripple effect that tore the NHL I knew it asunder and left me with teams like the Phoenix Coyotes instead of the Whale or the Nordiques.
I could rant all day about how great the NHL was when I was growing up, so it's probably better I stop now--and when my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, comes out next month, you can read more about my feelings on the subject through the main character's complaints. As of this writing, you can get this on Hulu. It's probably best as part of a streaming package like Hulu you're probably already paying for, rather than paying a separate fee as a rental. As an aside, we get Hulu packaged with Disney+ and ESPN+, and ESPN+ has almost every out of market NHL game included. Nothing like a Stars-Preds game followed by a Sharks-Ducks game on a Wednesday night.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13496236
And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
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