Donnie Wahlberg as Horst Cali a hostage negotiator with the Pittsburgh Police Department who has to match wits with John Leguizamo as Mr. Wolf, the leader of a small band of military vets who rob a downtown bank which goes terribly awry in THE KILL POINT.
© Spike TV
Mania Grade: A
Episodes:: The Series So Far
Starring: John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Tobin Bell
Produced By: Steve Shill
Airs: Sundays at 9:00-PM ET/PT on Spike TV
Episodes:: The Series So Far
Starring: John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Tobin Bell
Produced By: Steve Shill
Airs: Sundays at 9:00-PM ET/PT on Spike TV
THE KILL POINT
By: Stephen LackeyReview Date: Saturday, August 25, 2007
Because of the success of series such as Rescue Me, The Closer, Battlestar Galactica, and The 4400, cable networks are finally starting to give nighttime drama a shot. Something else making a comeback is the idea of a short season. Networks like HBO and Showtime have been doing this for a long time with their series, but now even major networks are green lighting shows with the plan to only do 13 episode seasons. Spike TV, a network I honestly don’t pay much attention to, quietly dropped an eight episode limited series on their network called The Kill Point. I hadn’t heard anything about the series until the first few episodes arrived on a DVD in my mail box.
In a nutshell, a group of well trained men rob a bank but through a series of unfortunate events, the thieves end up in a shoot out with police that eventually forces them back into the bank where they take some random people that are still hiding in the bank hostage. Quickly, within the first few minutes of the first episode, it’s revealed that the leader of the group, played by John Leguizamo, was actually the leader of these thieves when they were in the military. These guys are all highly trained ex-military and after coming home from our multiple wars in the Middle East they believe they weren’t given a fair shake so they were planning to take from the bank what they think the government should have given them. Enter the SWAT team and the grizzled hostage negotiator played by Donnie Wahlberg.
There’s a lot of formula in the set up of this story. We’ve seen it in movies time and time again. The expert hostage negotiator is brought in with a solid record of saving lives in these kinds of situations but his decisions seem to throw off his superiors causing them to second guess him and even take control of the situation from him only to screw it up. Anybody seen Die Hard or The Inside Man for example? At any rate, enter the wealthy businessman who has a family member inside the bank. Of course, our hostage negotiator refuses to give the businessman or his family member any special attention so the businessman starts throwing around his money and connections to get things moving his way. We have really seen all of this before, so why check out this new series? Well, there are a few reasons, the first being the cast. Right away, you may notice that our two lead actors are known entities that might not be high on the scale in Hollywood but they are top tier when it comes to basic cable and they do a fantastic job in this series. Tobin Bell (Saw) plays his part as the shady businessman to a tee as well. The other reason is that there’s a twist that starts to establish itself fairly quickly in the series that adds a new layer to this kind of story and adds a new layer of intrigue as well.
In the 80’s when I was growing up, I loved the soldier coming home to mistreatment types of films. In that era, they were all coming home from Vietnam, and they felt like while they were there they were serving their country and they felt proud, their own people hated them for what they did. The obvious examples of these films are the Rambo series and the Missing in Action series but The Kill Point actually reminds me of a lesser known Tommy Lee Jones film called The Park is Mine. In that film Jones plays a misunderstood war vet who takes over Central Park in New York City by surrounding it with traps just to make a point to his own country. Leguizamos’ character actually steps out of the bank to confront the hostage negotiator and the crowd of onlookers and makes similar statements about his service to the country he loves and how he was treated when he came home. Now, to be honest the scene is a little too melodramatic and the crowd reaction is way over the top but I like the idea of utilizing this very retro characterization especially when the picture he paints of himself and his men doesn’t end up being quite as red, white, and blue as he makes out.
So, in the end this series is built on some formulaic characters and situations, but what kept me glued to my TV is that each of the ingredients to the formula are given more depth than we may have seen before. The show is well acted and so far, well written and suspenseful. The production is appropriately slick other than one very small clumsy nod to Reservoir Dogs at the very beginning of the pilot.
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