SWAT: Under Siege (2017)

I saw this almost a year ago, back when I was looking for a film for Michael Jai White's induction post. I went with Chain of Command instead, and this sat in my watched list all that time. Considering it was getting to a point where I was going to have to watch it again to review it, I figured I'd get it posted now. In addition to us, our friend Simon from Explosive Action has covered this as well, so you can go to his site to see what he thinks.

SWAT: Under Siege follows SWAT guy Travis Hall (Sam Jaeger), who's looking to spend a nice 4th of July with his family, when he's called into work unexpectedly. The job turns out to be bringing in a dude with a scorpion tattooed on his back (White), who turns out to be a former special forces guy (aptly) named The Scorpion, and holds a lot of secrets that a lot of people want, including a gang of baddies who have laid siege to their SWAT facility. Now Jaeger and his team don't know who they can trust as they've hunkered down to fend off the advancing hoard. Will The Scorpion be of any help? What about their new boss (Adrianne Palicki), who's the reason they all have to work on the 4th of July anyway? I smell a labor grievance.

This is one of those DTV flicks that just is, if that makes sense. I don't know if it's good or bad. Michael Jai White was good in it, but the character construct is stuck in this loop of "will they or won't they trust him?", which is obnoxious, because we know they're going to trust him, they're just delaying the inevitable. Sam Jaeger as the head of the SWAT team is neither good nor bad either. He was as much at home here as he would've been as the working class contractor that the beautiful woman who makes good in the city then comes back to her hometown for the holidays falls in love with in a Hallmark Christmas movie. In that sense, having Adrianne Palicki from Agents of SHIELD would have been a better choice for his part, because her as a wife with a daughter and husband that she's leaving behind for the day would've been a novel concept, as opposed to the "we've seen this so many times before" concept it was with Jaeger. The baddies were sufficiently one-note Eurotrash, which is delivered almost with a note of cynicism, like Jaeger's hero they're just ticking off the boxes in making this movie. Just the same, White is good in this, and for a 90-minute time waster, you could do a lot worse, especially in that sea of options out there on streaming services. But should you settle for "could do a lot worse"?

This is now the 20th film for Michael Jai White on the DTVC, and while there is no official 20 Club, it's a milestone just the same. As unremarkable as this film is, if it's remarkable it all it's due to White's presence, which I think is the mark of a true DTVC Hall of Famer. It makes it all the more obnoxious though when his character is held back by the construct of him being a prisoner of the SWAT team. He also does a lot to overshadow Jaeger, through no fault of either person's. When he is unleashed though, it's the good Michael Jai White you came for. I saw that he has a couple nice looking films coming out in the near future, The Outlaw Johnny Black, and Black Friday. Hopefully we'll get those soon, but in the meantime, there is some stuff of his on Tubi that I could get to as well.

Adrianne Palicki plays the head of the SWAT department, so she's Jaeger's boss. I haven't seen a lot of episodes of Agents of SHIELD, but I know her Mockingbird character is a big deal on that show, so what happens is, we not only have White overshadowing Jaeger, but now we have Palicki as well. The other thing too is, had she had Jaeger's part, as I described, it really would've been a unique take on the tired trope of the family man doing a dangerous job. I don't know if they were stuck with Palicki in the role she had because she wasn't as available for shooting, but I really would've liked to have seen her team up with White to see what that would've looked like. Looking at her IMDb profile, she hasn't done a film since this one, except for a movie in production with the Broken Lizard crew, so this definitely wasn't the start of a burgeoning DTV career for her.

This is the third in the SWAT series, and when I reviewed the second one over ten years ago, I said that I thought the idea of a SWAT movie sounded better in theory than it did in practice, because generally SWAT does things quickly, and a movie needs 90s minutes to fill. It felt like this film was trying to mitigate that concern, the problem was they mitigated it by remaking Assault on Precinct 13. This is how the DTV world lures people in: use the plot of Assault on Precinct 13, attach the SWAT name to it, and slap White and Palicki on the cover with Jaeger. Then someone looking for a 90-minute time killer sees this and figures, why not? I'm trying to think if it was the same thing back in the video store days. I think with the video store I may have been more discerning, but the early 2000s digital cable days? Going through the guide bar, I see this listed, I might have gone for it. And I might have been disappointed.

For the last paragraph, I wanted to get back to this film's overarching premise, the idea that we'd be more compelled by the one-note every-move white guy as the lead than we would the mysterious former special forces guy with the scorpion tattooed on his back played by one of the best in the business, Michael Jai White. Even if they didn't know they were getting Michael Jai White for the film, just the idea as it's written sounds sauteed in wrong sauce. But I think this is a bit of the old idea of what an action movie should be bumping up against the modern reality of what the action movie could've been all along. The least compelling person in this is Jaeger's main character, yet he's shoehorned in as the lead when we have White and Palicki showing how much it's not working. Hopefully as we hit the 2020s we see fewer filmmakers sticking with the safe and boring, but I doubt it, because doing something new means taking a risk, and very few studios put money behind risks.

And with that, let's wrap this up. When I did watched this a year ago, it was only available on Crackle or Pluto. Now it looks like it's everywhere, including Netflix and Tubi. For me this may only be for Michael Jai White completists. It works as a 90-minute time killer, but with all the other options out there, do you need to settle for just a time killer?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6014472

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