Plot
Casey Ryback (Seagal) has retired from the United States Navy and is a chef at the Mile High Cafe in Denver, Colorado. Ryback is taking his estranged niece Sarah Ryback (Heigl) to Los Angeles to visit the grave of Ryback's brother James (Sarah's father). Sarah and her Uncle Casey board the Grand Continental, a train traveling through the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Los Angeles.
As the train proceeds through the Rocky Mountains, it is flagged down by two men. The engineer and the brakeman step out and are gunned down. A group of terrorists led by computer genius Travis Dane and mercenary leader Penn hijack the train, cutting its phone lines and taking the passengers as well as the staff hostage, herding them into the last two train cars. Ryback slips away by hiding in the cool room of the kitchen after killing one of the mercenaries. Dane worked on a top secret military satellite particle weapon called Grazer One. The military fired Dane, who then faked his own death. Two of Dane's former Department of Defense colleagues are aboard the train, hiding a romantic relationship that violates Department of Defense regulations. Dane has them brought to him and threatens to have one of his mercenaries insert a burning needle into their eye unless they give him the codes needed to take over Grazer One. They give him the codes and then are thrown from the train, killing them.
Middle Eastern terrorists have offered Dane $1 billion to destroy the Eastern seaboard by using Grazer One to target a nuclear reactor located under the Pentagon. Dane destroys a Chinese chemical plant in order to demonstrate Grazer One's capabilities to his investors and, after one investor offers an additional $100 million, Dane destroys an airliner carrying the investor's ex-wife.
The U.S. government cannot locate Dane's headquarters nor target Grazer One because Dane created fifty "ghost satellites" to hide the location of the real Grazer One. When officials destroy what they think is Grazer One, it turns out to be the NSA's best intelligence satellite. As long as the train keeps moving, his location cannot be determined. Ryback, who has discovered the plot, takes matters into his own hands. Ryback enlists an eager porter named Bobby Zachs to help him. He also faxes a message to the owner of the Mile High Cafe, who finally reads it and relays the word to Admiral Bates; Bates quickly understands that Dane and the terrorists are on the train, and reluctantly OK's a mission by two F-117 Stealth bombers to destroy the train. Zachs discovers that they are on the wrong tracks and are on a collision course with a Southern Pacific bulk freight train carrying gasoline tank cars. Ryback kills the mercenaries one by one, but Dane uses his computer skills to find the Stealths and retarget Grazer One to knock them out before they complete their mission.
After Penn takes Sarah as bait for Ryback, Ryback confronts Penn, who is aware of Ryback's military past. Ryback disarms and kills Penn by breaking his neck. He then finds Dane who is about to depart in a chopper hovering over the train, unaware that Zachs has killed a female terrorist and is forcing the pilot to wait for Sarah and Ryback at gunpoint. When Dane informs Ryback that there is no way to stop the satellite from destroying Washington, Ryback shoots him, the bullet destroying his computer and injuring Dane, who falls out of a window of the train. Control of the satellite is restored at the Pentagon and it is destroyed by remote control one second before it would have fired on the Pentagon, just before the two trains collide.
The crash happens on a trestle, resulting in an explosion that destroys the bridge. Ryback escapes by racing through the exploding train and grabbing a rope ladder hanging from the chopper. Dane, who survived the gunshot and the crash, has also caught the ladder and attempts to climb onto the helicopter while screaming that he and Ryback should join forces. Ryback silently shuts the door, severing Dane's fingers and causing him to fall to his death into the explosion. Ryback informs the Pentagon that the passengers are safe, as he previously detached the last two cars from the rest of the train. In the final scene, Sarah and her uncle Casey pay their final respects at her father's gravestone.
Read more about this topic: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)