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Bruce Willis plays supremely confident hostage negotiator, Jeff Talley. We know this because he smugly lies down while talking to the bad guys and combs his beard in the process. Talley snaps into action when the situation gets more tense though, especially since he unwisely takes a sniper’s shot away from him because “nobody dies today.” A psychic’s license he does not have though and soon he’s got a dead family on his hands. The one piece of originality about this opening is Talley pulls an opposite by becoming clean-shaven and promoted to Chief AFTER the tragedy. Perhaps it’s a lateral move to what seems like a six-officer precinct, but at least he’s not getting families murdered.

Ah, but he’ll have his chance when Walter Smith (Kevin Pollak) (“you dream it, we build it” for the Chicagoans out there) and his precocious children are held captive on a whim by some ne’er-do-well punks. Frothing Dennis (Jonathan Tucker) just wants to steal his car but new friend, Mars (Ben Foster, making his best attempt to be Fargo’s Peter Stormare) goes on a shooting spree when the cops show up. Talley makes initial contact before handing it over to the big-boy police, but is then ambushed in his own car by a second set of hostage-takers. Turns out Mr. Smith isn’t the cleanest of whistles and these evildoers need a DVD out of the house. (And we know they’re bad guys because they kill the dog.) To insure they have a wildcard, they grab Talley’s family (which includes Bruce’s actual daughter, Rumer, whose acting career now consists of being kidnapped and watching her mom’s breasts on stage.)

Up to this point, Hostage has been a somewhat ridiculous but incredibly slick action piece. It’s fast and relentless, even as the corners of our mouth are dying to curve upwards. But it slows down just enough for logic to cough-up an “ahem” and unleash of barrage of stupidity and over-the-top flamboyance that it’s impossible to follow straight into hell.

Take for example the matter of the DVD. Early on, Walter tells his clients where he’s putting their special disc. Maybe he’s just using code on the hard line, but he stills places the DVD in a case of Heaven Can Wait and into the alphabetized collection in his office. (Alphabetized, of course, except for a copy of the director’s previous film, The Nest, which stands out amongst the H’s.) Now, the baddies have been told where the DVD is, but they don’t bother to tell Talley. Forget for a moment that it might be easier to just let the situation resolve itself naturally and business as usual could continue with Walter. But, no.

Instead, they are asking Talley to get the DVD without telling him what it is, preventing him from negotiating it being sent out with an unconscious victim of the crisis. In turn, this forces Talley to wake up said vegetable against all medical sense to find out the name of the DVD. Then, Talley must use little Tommy (Jimmy Bennett) like an amateur John McClane to negotiate his secret air duct hiding place and risk all life and limb to retrieve the DVD. Thank God the kid has a working knowledge of remakes. It’s hard to maintain a straight face when the film’s Macguffin turns the heroes and villains into psychotic Blockbuster employees.

And this is only the second act. The insanity bound for you in the final reel is a smorgasbord of brimstone and the ugliness of the most tasteless slasher films. We’ve lost all sense of the potential for a great stand-off between Talley and the various villainous personalities; one, cold & calculated, and the other as just plain reckless. Talley has made his half-hearted attempts at playing one against the other and emotionally scarring the overly eager little boy, but the only suspense created is through the comically bombastic score by Alexandre Desplat.

Director Florent Siri lets us know early on that he’s going way over-the-top with this material with his angled shots and grandiloquent opening credits. You can also spot a European director by the way he photographs the young girl he’s cast; in this case 17-year old Michelle Horn whose breasts take center stage over her peril. Siri should take a cue from Kim Coates who joins the ranks of David Prowse and Eric Stoltz in performances done behind a mask for a full running time. Then again, that’s precisely what Siri is doing here, covering up an idiotic screenplay (based on a best-selling novel by veteran TV writer, Robert Crais) and a total lack of Hitchcockian savvy by amping up the noise and the lunacy. To his credit, Siri has made one of the funniest films of 2005, but for a film like this to miss on someone who proudly has Commando and Road House in his DVD collection, the incompetence level is staggering.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11793&reviewer=198
originally posted: 03/11/05 15:37:57
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