The least action hero

also showing; UNDER SIEGE 2 Geoff Murphy (18) HAUNTED Lewis Gilbert (15) THE LIFE AND EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF PRIVATE IVAN CHONKIN Jiri Menzel (15) TAKE CARE OF YOUR SCARF, TATJANA Aki Kaurismaki (no cert)

There may never have been a movie hero quite as spectacularly inert as Steven Seagal. For all their faults, at least Jean-Claude Van Damme and Cynthia Rothrock actually put in the legwork. Seagal, on the other hand, is like the big lug at the back of the class in PE - always trying to get away with doing as little as possible. In his violent new film Under Siege 2, he is called upon to dart to and fro on the roof of a train with tremendous agility, and dispatch a team of lethal terrorists. But when he fights, he barely lifts more than his eyebrow. Every move he makes is tinged with the brazen confidence of a fellow who knows that his stunt man will step in should anything tricky arise.

Seagal must have watched all those Bond movies and remembered what a fool Roger Moore looked, getting all plum-faced and flustered whenever he was called upon to dangle from a ski-lift. I'm not going to end up like that, you can imagine the young Seagal telling himself as he and his family watched Moonraker after scoffing their Christmas pudding. And he didn't. He turned into the Christmas pudding: lumpen, stodgy, just sort of sitting there. He may be the first slacker action hero we've seen.

In Under Siege 2, he applies the same approach to acting. This time around, he has a pubescent niece (Katherine Heigl) to mind, which gives him far too many opportunities to be sensitive (and also briefly threatens to turn the film into some unholy hybrid of Lolita and Silver Streak). "I felt strongly that I wanted to add the family element," he has said. The family element? That's a bit rich coming from a film in which the greatest technical achievement is the way the sound of a skull splitting echoes around the auditorium in grisly Dolby stereo.

No, Under Siege 2 is best when it sticks to snapping people's legs off. There's some technical mumbo-jumbo littering the plot - the film unfolds on the Grand Continental, hijacked by Travis Dane (Eric Bogosian), a psychotic egghead who uses the train as an untraceable base from which to feed a satellite instructions to wipe out Washington DC. But once the corpses start piling up, Dane could be plotting to pervert the bar-codes on Wall's sausages and it wouldn't change the film one iota.

Bogosian, though, makes an enormous difference. The coruscating stand- up comedian and writer/ star of Oliver Stone's Talk Radio gives the picture a jazzy lift. With his sharpened jibes and piercing, confrontational manner, watching him in this pap is like finding a shard of flint in your porridge. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captor speaking," he announces over the train tannoy. "In the event of an emergency, it may be necessary to kill you." And Seagal? Heheaves himself up out of his seat with a sigh, more off-to-bed than off-to-save-the-world.

You can see where Under Siege 2 is aimed; after a few beers, I imagine it would begin to look like an appealing prospect, rather like a doner kebab, or Paula Yates. But trying to conceive of a situation where anybody would want to see the new British horror film Haunted, I drew a blank. The picture attempts to fuse early Hammer with Brideshead Revisited, resulting in a laughably inept Tale of the Expected. Aidan Quinn plays a professor who is summoned to a country mansion to investigate a haunting. Things do go bump in the night, notably the headboard once Quinn gets his hands on young Christina (Kate Beckinsale), an enigmatic floozy who may be sleeping with her brother (Anthony Andrews). It would be the worst film of 1995 had The Road to Wellville not been released this year.

Jiri Menzel's gentle satire The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is as compelling as its title makes it sound. It shares its genes with Menzel's 1966 charmer Closely Observed Trains - both focus on mild-mannered innocents dispatched to remote climes where they fall in love. But for all the film's subtleties, and its pointed digs at socialism, it only comes alive when it resorts to crude slapstick.

The new double-bill of work by the eccentric, minimalist Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki - comprising Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana and Total Balalaika Show - is playing at London's ICA, before a short regional tour. The first is a gentle road- movie shot in mostly static takes. It barely leaves the starting blocks, but Kaurismaki's view of male camaraderie, all gaping pregnant pauses and car fetishism, is very winning. Total Balalaika Show is a film of the Leningrad Cowboys, who claim to be the worst band in the world, playing to 70,000 people with the Red Army Ensemble. The set-list is idiosyncratic to say the least - "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", "Happy Together", "Delilah". The band sport their trademark gallion quiffs and enormous winkle-pickers, though there's the feeling that the joke, which began with the lovely Leningrad Cowboys Go America, hasn't really gone far enough. But that's the point. Kaurismaki has made "less is more" his defining ideology: his work is so understated, you have to squint to make it out.

n All films open tomorrow

RYAN GILBEY