Entertainment Weekly
"...A provocative, incendiary subject....Points the way for Bening as a soulful nerotic siren of the Faye Dunaway school..." 11/13/1998 pp.47-50USA Today
"...Denzel Washington is fun to watch..." 11/27/1998 p.6E Box Office
"...Washington is perfectly cast as the film's conscience and voice of reason. Shalhoub, in a more dramatic turn than usual, is believable and effective..." 12/01/1998 p.42 Los Angeles Times
"...THE SIEGE is a political thriller with more plausibility -- and yes, more thrills -- than most....It's a pleasure to have actors of this caliber working together....THE SIEGE also benefits from being well-crafted..." 11/06/1998 p.C1 Premiere
3 stars out of 4 -- "A film that was an interesting concept in 1998 and quickly became astoundingly prescient after 2001 06/15/2009 Time Magazine 7 of 10
[The Siege presents] the bruising, intricately staged spectacle of New York City brought to a quaking halt by a series of ever more serious bombings--first a bus, then a crowded theater, then a federal building--mounted by that lately easiest-to-despise of all groups, Arab fanatics. A panicked government institutes martial law, which includes internment camps and occasional descents into torture when no one can think of any better solution to a crisis. As a result, there's plenty of (literally) raw material to keep the action fans happy. But let's give director Edward Zwick and his fellow screenwriters, Lawrence Wright and Menno Meyjes, credit for complicating their material, and therefore our responses to it, in ways that go well beyond the demands of the genre. They give us an FBI agent in charge of the case--played by that paragon of sexy stalwartness, Denzel Washington--whose heroism lies largely in his ability to reconsider hasty conclusions. They provide him with an assistant of Arab descent (a quietly smoldering Tony Shalhoub), caught in a conflict between duty and disgust when the soldiery snatches his son because he happens to match a terrorist profile. They also add to the team a sassy CIA operative (Annette Bening) who knows more about these terrorists than she can tell because she's in love with one of them. Even Bruce Willis' Army general, leading the troops who take over the city, is given an interesting spin. He's one tough, exceedingly dutiful nut. But we also know he's overcompensating, because in an earlier scene he has given a speech against martial law. He doesn't think policing their own citizens is proper work for soldiers. There's a lot packed into The Siege, and the strains of its plotting sometimes show. So does the effort to disarm ethnic and religious protests by insisting on the distinction between the peaceful Muslim majority and the terrorist minority. These passages are obvious (and probably useless) in ways that the rest of the movie is not. But Zwick, who directed Glory, remains good with both massed action and more intensely intimate confrontations, and better still at finding ways to sound and sustain a humane and compassionate note, no matter how bloody the spectacle out of which it arises. - Richard Schickel
Box Office Magazine 7 of 10
Post-Cold War Middle Eastern paranoia is the subject of director/co-writer/co-producer Edward Zwick's The Siege, a flawed but not uninteresting political thriller that struggles with middling success to satisfy the dual aims of being both commercially entertaining and socially significant. Contrary to the contentions of Arab-American leaders who have accused the filmmakers of feeding racist and inflammatory sentiments, the story is painstakingly fair and does raise some compelling issues with regard to civil rights... As law-abiding Arab-Americans are interned without trial--in some instances even tortured--the audience is asked to confront the moral quandary of how far a government should or shouldn't go to enforce the law and protect its citizenry. To this end, the filmmakers spare no device, however obvious, even going so far as to include a Lebanese-born FBI agent, played by Tony Shalhoub, on Washington's team. In a sense, The Siege could serve as a semi-sequel to Zwick's and Washington's last collaboration, Courage Under Fire, which dealt with similar issues inside the military establishment. As in that earlier film, Washington is perfectly cast as the film's conscience and voice of reason. Tony Shalhoub, in a more dramatic turn than usual, is surprisingly convincing and effective, despite the obviousness of the character... Technical credits, including Zwick's direction, are predictably slick... - Wade Major
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