Nothing kills a good action movie like bombs that look like firecrackers. And in "Diplomatic Siege," all the bombs are firecrackers. Some dude shoots a bazooka – poof, it's a firecracker. Another dude throws a grenade – poof, another firecracker.And they're not even good firecrackers. They're like those ones that have a great name on the wrapper, like "Hiroshima Deluxe," but just make a flash and a big puff of smoke and you're all, "Man, I spent $16.99 for that?"Daryl Hannah is in this. She's somewhere between "Roxanne" hot and "Kill Bill" used up and poisoned by cigs. In this movie, she plays the role of "Daryl Hannah Playing the Role of Somebody Who Isn't Daryl Hannah." She fails.Peter Weller is in this, looking and acting exactly the same as he has in every movie he's ever made, from "Buckaroo Banzai" to "Robocop" to… has he done anything else?"The secret to good acting is to purse your lips all the time and act like you don't care," is something Peter Weller never said, but probably thinks all the time.Tom Berenger is apparently in this, but I lost patience before he showed up. Doesn't matter. If he didn't show up as the guy from "Sniper," it wouldn't be worth the wait anyway.Brion James plays some kind of general or colonel or something, but who cares, because he plays it like a Replicant. I suspect he always was one anyway. Rest his soul. I always felt bad he died after making two decent movies and 100 that weren't any damn good.Aaaaaanyway, I don't know what this movie is about. A group of bad guys takes over an embassy. Or something.You know what? Just skip it and read a book.

(There are Spoilers) Almost impossible to follow hostage drama with so many twists and turns that you feel like a pretzel, twisting and turning along with them, by the time the movie is finally over. There's this gang of Serbian terrorists lead by US Army trained commando Goran Mladnov, Adrian Pintea, storming and taking over the US Embassy in Bucharest Romania. After a wild and bloody shoot-out the Serbians holding 37 hostages demand the release of their national hero the head of the dreaded Brown Hats Col. Peter Vojnovic, Vwe Ochsenknecht. Col. Vojnovic had been kidnapped by US Special Forces and put on trial at the Hague for the crimes his Brown Hat's committed in the wars in Bosnia & Croatia.As all this is going on upstairs in the embassy down in the sub-basement computer experts Steve Mitchell, Peter Weller, and his former girlfriend Erica Long, Daryl Hanna, and Sgt. Tim Nakajima, Radman Agana Jao, are busily trying to disconnect an Atomic Bomb planted in the America Embessy in the 1950's during the hight of the Cold War. It also happens that Mitchell's 14 year-old son Chris, Jeremy Lelliott, has hid in the embassy, in Chris' avoiding to go out on a date with a chubby Romnian girl, and causes so much trouble for everyone , the Serbians the hostages as well as his dad, that he almost causes the Atomic Bomb to accidentally go off before it's disconnected!Things really get muddled when Col. Vojnovic ends up getting murdered by the person guarding him, Constantin Barbulesco, who's not only a Croat but who's family was massacred by the Colonel's Brown Hat's during the savage fighting in his native Croatia! Knowing that there's nothing left, with Col. Vojnovic's sudden death, to bargain with the Srebian terrorists the Pentagon's head military man Gen. Stubbs, Brion James, sends his top commando and anti-insurgent expert Vietnam and Gulf War hero Gen. "Buck" Swain, Tom Berenger, to get the job done in freeing the hostages. The one major problem that Gen. Swain has is not only the uncooperative Romanian police and military but the fact that Gen. Stubb never told him that there's an Atomic Bomb hidden in the US Embessy that's about to go off at any moment!Mindless but exciting action sequences as well as a number of surprises, one of them has to do with a mole hidden in the US Embassy, makes the movie at least watchable despite not making any sense at all. Gen. Swain and Serbian terrorist Goran turn out to have been classmate at the Ft. Bragg Army Base which really has nothing to do with what their doing, trying to kill each other, in the film. The fact that they know each other has the two able to reminisce about the good times they had learning how to kill people and blow up things which they do all throughout the movie.****SPOILER ALERT***The almost anti-climatic ending has the mole, who was hidden among the hostages,come out of hiding and after almost having the city of Bucharest, together with the US Embessy, blown sky high has a change of heart giving Mitchell the secret code to stop the Atomic Bomb from detonating and turns from villain to hero in a matter of minutes. It was also the 25 million dollars wired into the mole's secret numbered Swiss Bank Account that had a big hand in him, or her, keeping the lid on the nuclear device and thus keep it from from blowing up a city of over two million people!

I only watched this movie for two reasons: 1) it was on sat TV v late at night and I was wide awake working on some emails and 2) I was actually working in Bucharest when this was filmed - it was filmed just near my office in fact. I remember taking a pic of my editor walking thru a bunch of security-uniformed extras as we strolled up the hill for lunch....It really was awful. How could you not make a good action pic when you have: a) a great location. Bucharest post-Cold War (by the way, Romania was not part of the Warsaw Pact - remember the Queen gave Ceaucescu a knighthood - so why plant an atomic bomb there?). There were virtually no scenes of Ceaucescu's mad megalomaniacal city. They may as well not have been on location. Plus they could have shot some scenes up in Transylvania. What a waste. b) Daryl Hannah, still looking gorgeous, but no sexy scenes at all, just farcical groping and snogging, and c) Tom Berenger, a great guy to have in an action movie, and d) Romanian women, the second-best looking women in Europe(after Slovenia).This could have been a wonderful, dark, atmospheric, sexy spy movie, not just a straight to video idiot's action film.I suspect they only made this movie because it was so cheap then to shoot movies in Romania. So it was budget-led. Once you start scrimping, you scrimp on everything and you end up with an humungous flop. The director and writers should shoot himself if they haven't already. The errors and lack of attention to detail or credibility are endless. Does the Romanian air force really paint 'Romanian Air Force' on its planes when Romania has a perfectly good language of its own? Do UN peacekeeping troops really guard prisoners at the ICC in The Haque? I think not - there's no peace to keep. And if the UN really did waste PK troops on this duty, would they garrison it with Croatian forces, to guard an alleged Serbian war criminal? (And you wouldn't have a single Croat there in a mixed force because country troops work together, and oh by the way Croatia is not a UN member country).

I just saw this movie on DVD because it had a plot similar to something I am writing. This movie just did not come together and no one seemed to have their heart in the project especially for a medium budget movie ($45 million).I think there were some good ideas, but the lack of attention to details makes it almost amusing in places and impossible to believe the acting. I think the viewer gets distracted by the problems like banging the fire extinguisher on the air shaft while supposed to be sneaking through it, and the person responsible for disarming an atomic bomb not knowing how to work a fire extinguisher. The chain of these unbelievable details seems to keep poping up throughout. However, looking for the problems in the movie is the most charming thing about it.