Under Siege 2: Dark Territory()

After locating his bag in the baggage car and taking out his MessagePad from it, Ryback (Steven Seagal) types in a fax message to his cook at his restaurant, the Mile High Café, in order for him to pass it on to Admiral Bates (Andy Romano), and he turns on the previously-disconnected power in the downstairs section of the lounge car and hooks the device up to a damaged phone in there so he can send the message. After noticing that the line is busy on his first attempt, he sets the MessagePad to make continuous auto redials until the line is clear while he takes off to tend to other matters. Penn (Everett McGill) finds the MessagePad a short time later, but when he finds it, we see that Ryback’s fax has gotten through. Penn takes the device to the upstairs section of the lounge car that he and Travis (Eric Bogosian) have been using as their headquarters for their operation, and as Travis checks the device’s contents, he reads aloud the title of a list called “Ryback’s Tactics”, and hearing this makes Penn realize that he and his men have been dealing with Ryback this whole time. Penn then has one of his men check the passenger manifest to see if Ryback is traveling with anyone, hoping to find a loved one that he can use as bait against him, and he finds out that Ryback does have a plus one on board. He and a few of his men thus go into the last two cars of the train where all of the passengers are being kept hostage, and he manages to figure out that Sarah (Katherine Heigl) is the extra traveler when he spots her late father’s Navy Cross medal around her neck. He and a mercenary thus grab her and force her to come with them to their headquarters.

Ryback soon launches an attack on the headquarters with a homemade bomb, and while Travis and the other mercenaries are preoccupied with dealing with him, Bobby (Morris Chestnut) sneaks up into their car via the dumbwaiter and takes the targeting CD out of their computer that Travis needs in order to fire Grazer One at whatever target he wants. Travis soon discovers that the disc is missing, and thinking that Ryback took it, Penn orders his men to find him and recover it. As Ryback is climbing across the cars on the outside of the train back to the cargo hold to meet with Bobby, a mercenary catches him and orders him to hand over the CD. He then gets too close to Ryback, which enables Ryback to grab him and fall off the train with him, and they roll down a hill and over the edge of a cliff. Ryback grabs hold of a ledge to stop his fall, and he hits the mercenary a few times to make him lose his grip on him and fall to his death. Penn orders his men in the locomotive to stop the train, and when they do, it winds up saving Bobby from being shot by some mercenaries that find him. Bobby then gets out of the train, and some of the mercenaries exit the train to look for him and Ryback. Bobby tries to take some shots at them with his handgun, but misses, and he rolls beneath the train and out the other side into the woods, putting the CD on the tracks in an attempt to hide it from the villains. However, a mercenary spots him and orders another one of the mercenaries to go after him. Two men attach repelling ropes on the side of one of the cars and rappel down the cliffside after Ryback, but he disposes of them both, and though the mercenary who was pursuing Bobby manages to catch up to him, Bobby shoots and kills him. Unfortunately, Penn finds the CD, and after he and his remaining men get back on board the train, he communicates to the locomotive to get the train rolling again. He then shoots off the rappelling ropes as Ryback is climbing up one of them, but Ryback grabs a ledge again to keep himself from plummeting to his death. Bobby returns to the train and jumps back onto it without being seen before it can speed back up, and he hides back in the cargo hold and paces around wondering what to do next.

Travis puts the CD back into his computer and makes Grazer One ready to fire at the Pentagon and its nuclear reactor below in 20 minutes time. The people at ATAC see this and start trying to find a way to make the satellite self-destruct before it can fire. Meanwhile, Ryback gets back on solid ground, but he sees that the train has gone too far ahead for him to catch up on foot, so he goes back to an old station that the train just passed and hotwires an old truck that is parked there and drives after it. After he manages to get up on some high ground just above the train, he abandons the truck and jumps onto the roof, then makes his way down to the cargo hold and saves Bobby from a mercenary who just found him by snapping his neck.

While all of this goes on, Ryback’s cook eventually finds and reads the fax, and he manages to get in touch with Admiral Bates. He goes over the fax, which reveals how many armed men are on board the train and what train they are on, but only when the cook reads off that high-bandwidth satellite transmission equipment has been loaded onboard that Bates and General Cooper (Kurtwood Smith) realize that Travis is on that train. As Cooper has one of his subordinates look up the train’s location, the cook informs Bates that Ryback sent the message. Bates talks to another subordinate and finds out that the closest air strike group they have are stealth bombers that are in for a local air show, so he orders them armed and sent towards the train with orders to destroy it in case if Ryback doesn’t come up with some kind of miracle before the satellite fires on the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern terrorists who commissioned Travis, Penn, and the mercenaries to carry out this attack wire the $1 billion they owe them for it, and the villains make ready to leave the train “at the next stop,” which Ryback and Bobby overhear on a walkie-talkie.

As the train comes up on “dark territory” (where there will be no phone or radio reception available and is the aforementioned “next stop”), Travis remotely activates a switch on the track that sends the train down another track that goes outside of a ghost town, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Bobby. After checking out the train schedules for that particular track, Ryback finds out that the train is now on a head-on collision course with a train from the Nevada Petrol Express, and Bobby points out to him that that train is a mile long, has six locomotives, and is carrying 800,000 gallons of gasoline (and which Travis and Penn had picked so all of the hostages will be killed after they and their comrades get off the train). With this in mind, Ryback becomes more determined than ever to rescue the passengers. Meanwhile, Bates, Cooper, and the rest of the staff at ATAC also find out the same information regarding the Nevada Petrol Express, and after being told by a subordinate that they can’t contact the Nevada train because they are in dark territory, nor will the explosion created by the collision be enough to destroy Travis’ equipment, Bates orders the stealth bombers to carry through with destroying the train. However, both of the bombers’ signals gets picked up by Travis’ equipment. Travis initially thinks that he can’t destroy them, given the fact that he would have to unlock Grazer One from Washington first, plus he doesn’t have the bombers’ transponder numbers to target them with, but he soon figures out that he can have the satellite locate them through the turbulence they generate in flight. His idea works, and Grazer One obliterates the bombers just as they get within range of the train.

Ryback and Bobby go into the hostage cars and kill all the mercenaries watching the hostages, and Ryback gets on one of the mercenaries’ walkie-talkies and warns Penn that he is coming to get his niece now, but Penn defiantly challenges him to come and get her. Ryback and Bobby then uncouple the two cars from the rest of the train to save the passengers, but then Ryback notices a helicopter that is coming in to extract the mercenaries from the roof of the lounge car. Ryback tells Bobby to climb up its ladder and commandeer it from the pilot while he goes after Sarah. As Bobby climbs up, the pilot tells Penn that he is just making his first pickup, but Penn – knowing that the man is not one of his own – sends his lone female mercenary up after Bobby to get rid of him. She climbs the ladder and reaches the chopper just after Bobby gets inside, and they subsequently get into a fight. The mercenary quickly proves to be the superior fighter, but Bobby executes a self-defense trick on her that he learned from Sarah earlier that day and throws her out of the chopper, where she crashes onto the train’s roof and dies. He then puts his gun to the pilot’s head and orders him to keep following the train.

Penn stands Sarah up and puts a cable around her neck, awaiting Ryback’s arrival in the adjoining dining car. Shortly after Ryback comes in, Penn holds an unpinned grenade next to Sarah in order to force Ryback to face him without any guns, and after Ryback lays down his firearm, Penn places the grenade in Sarah’s hand and makes her hold down the lever. Penn then joins Ryback in the dining car, after which they both pull out their combat knives and have a knife fight with each other, and the fight goes down into the kitchen below. After losing both of their knives, Penn grabs hold of a cleaver, and after making several failed attempts to kill Ryback with it, Ryback disarms him, grabs hold of him, and kills him by snapping his neck. At that moment, Travis tells Sarah that he is deboarding the train now before it crashes into the Nevada Petrol Express and taking a portable computer with him that will ensure that Grazer One’s attack on the Pentagon happens, but Sarah warns him that she will drop the grenade she has if he takes so much as a single step towards the escape route made in the lounge car’s roof. Travis doesn’t buy it and starts to leave, but then Ryback comes in with his gun back in his hand, and he takes the grenade and throws it towards Travis. The explosion destroys a bunch of his equipment, but not him or his computer, and when Ryback confronts him with his gun pointed at him, Travis tells him that shooting him won’t do any good because ATAC can’t get past his ghost satellites and he can’t get past his encrypted program. Ryback responds by shooting his portable computer and destroying it, which succeeds in ending his control over Grazer One and giving it back to ATAC while also giving away its location. They quickly program Grazer One to self-destruct, and it explodes just moments before it can fire its laser at the Pentagon. Ryback’s shot also goes through the computer and into Travis, who stumbles backwards out of one of the windows.

Ryback and Sarah start to climb out of the lounge car’s roof just as the Nevada Petrol Express shows up and collides with the train while they are over a ravine, killing the remaining mercenaries in the locomotive, and though Sarah manages to grab the helicopter’s ladder and get out of harm’s way, Ryback is still stuck on the train. He thus runs as fast as he can all the way to the rear of the train and jumps out and grabs the ladder before the last of the two trains falls into the ravine and gets destroyed in a hellacious explosion. Sarah pushes the button on the ladder’s winch to pull her uncle back up, but suddenly, Travis – having survived his fall – surprises Ryback by grabbing his leg. Ryback manages to get into the chopper despite Travis hanging on to his leg the whole way up, and Travis is left holding onto the bottom edge of the doorway. As Travis calls out to Ryback to pull him inside, Ryback closes the chopper’s door on his fingers, severing them, and he falls straight down into the explosion’s flames below and dies. They all then barely manage to get clear of the flames, and Ryback radios ATAC and lets them know that the hostages are safe.

The movie ends with Ryback and Sarah in Los Angeles paying tribute at the grave of Sarah’s father/Ryback’s brother.