HOSTAGE

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Sunday, March 13, 2005

HOSTAGE starts so promisingly that we have high hopes. Ace LAPD hostage negotiator Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) tries to talk down a crazed man, angling for a resolution in which nobody dies. The situation ends disastrously. A year later, Jeff has moved away from Los Angeles, with his wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and resentful daughter (Rumer Willis, the star's real-life daughter), to a job as police chief of a small California town where nothing ever happens.

Unfortunately for Jeff and a lot of other people wealthy accountant Walter Smith (Kevin Pollak) lives in a fortress-like mansion just outside town, with teenaged daughter Jennifer (Michelle Horn) and young son Tommy (Jimmy Bennett). A trio of adolescent miscreants hothead Dennis (Jonathan Tucker), Dennis' okay kid brother Kevin (Marshall Allman) and certifiably psychopath Mars (Ben Foster) breaks into the Smith household, triggering the building's automated lockdown functions and police response. A hostage situation develops. Jeff stands aside for the negotiator from Los Angeles ... but Walter's employers see the standoff on the news. There's something inside the house that they want, they would like Jeff to retrieve it for them and they'll kill Jeff's family if he refuses.

The thriller premise is perfectly sound and director Florent Siri and writer Doug Richardson, working from Robert Crais' novel, do such a sterling job in the opening sections that we become invested. It helps that supporting actor Pollak is smoothly convincing as both loving father and cold businessman and human being smart enough to know when he's in deep trouble. However, the sprint of the prologue, sort of a short film in itself, gives way to the marathon of the main storyline, and while we can sort of buy the devolution of the situation with the three home invaders, Siri makes a tactical error in increasingly depicting their activities in horror movie terms (there's a shot of one guy scrambling through an air shaft that seems to have been lifted from a vampire film).

It also doesn't help that we know almost nothing about the Maguffin that Walter's employers covet so desperately. These people have such extraordinary resources that we start wondering how this one ambiguous and seemingly trivial thing can mess them up so badly. It's the type of question that only occurs to viewers who have become detached from the action. Instead of a growing sense of dread, we start seeing the cracks, especially as Siri encourages most of the supporting cast to go over the top in moments where understatement would have served far better.


Willis does a good job with Jeff's mostly wordless panic and rage, though the film tries too hard to make us guess whether the character is for real or not in moments where he loses control (or perhaps just appears to lose it to gain a tactical edge). Because the context has become so hazy and unconvincing, we can't really appreciate the suspense of whether Jeff is playing mind games or truly coming unglued.

HOSTAGE is diverting in a popcorn thriller way, but the harder it tries to top itself and justify its increasingly elaborate setpieces, the less gripping it becomes.