Originally posted 3/23/05
Hostage
Director: Florent Siri
Writer: Doug Richardson, based on the novel by Robert Crais
Producers: Bruce Willis, Arnold Rifkin, Mark Gordon, Bob Yari
Stars: Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollak, Jimmy Bennett, Michelle Horn, Ben Foster, Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman, Serena Scott Thomas, Rumer Willis, Kim Coates
Hostage opens with a scene which is expensive, loud and, if you bother to think about it, totally unnecessary. In it, a bushy-haired and gray-bearded Jeff Tally (Bruce Willis) is lead negotiator in an armed standoff in Los Angeles. It goes badly, people are killed, and Tally feels responsible since he gambled and was wrong.
But lest we misunderstand this to mean he is not a very good hostage negotiator, characters take care to shout lots of dialogue at us about how he is the best in the business, and has been working this case for 16 hours now after having worked two other terribly stressful cases this week alone. Okay, so we get the message – Jeff Tally is great, he’s the Eddie Van Halen of hostage negotiators. The question is, what can it possibly have to do with the story we are about to watch?
Once the plot is actually rolling, Tally is the cleanly-shaved, confidence-shattered Sheriff of a small California mountain town. During one long day he is going to have to deal with a new, dangerously unstable hostage situation as well as the kidnapping of his own family. Isn’t that motivation enough without him also having to recover his wounded mojo?
But playing dead-end middle-aged cops in photogenic small towns is not something movie stars do. The only reason a fish this big deigns to be in this small a pond is because they’re haunted. It’s just one of many signs that Hostage is unimpressive as a screw-turning potboiler, competent but favoring cliché over guts, and never able to settle on a prevailing tempo.
The crime starts small, with three joyriding petty criminal teenagers – the Kelly brothers (Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman), and their new friend, a greasy-haired budding sociopath who calls himself Mars (Ben Foster). They get some attitude from Jennifer Smith (Michelle Horn), the daughter of rich financial manager Walter Smith (Kevin Pollak), so they decide to follow her home and steal the Smiths’ pretty SUV.
But then resourceful son Tommy (Jimmy Bennett) trips the silent alarm, the cop who answers finds another carjacking warrant attached to their license plate, and Mars has to go and whip two pistols out of his belt in slow-motion, like a guy who has worn out a VHS copy of Desperado, and gun down the poor officer. These kids today…
Well out of their depth now, the punks activate the security system, shuttering the place like a fortress, and start ineffectually bickering and tying people up. Walter hardly seems to need restraint, as he’s been pistol-whipped into a near comatose state. When Tally arrives and asks to negotiate, the kids shoot at his car and demand a helicopter.
He’s ready and eager to hand these loose screws off to a higher authority and go home, but here is the part where the music used to go dun dun DUNNNNNNN! – our Mr. Smith is holding a DVD that is very important to some unidentified rich ne’er-do-wells, and they don’t want any federales stumbling across it. Since no one in movies like this believes in simple plans, these crooks kidnap Tally’s family and demand he retrieve the disc for them right under everyone’s noses.
The kidnapper they hire for the task, played by Kim Coates, is the best part of the movie because he works at such a right angle to the slimy-evil personality you would expect. Hidden from start-to-finish behind a ski mask or cell phone, the performance is almost entirely vocal, and his voice is soothing, reassuring, oddly respectful. Even when handcuffing Tally to a steering wheel he remembers to say “please” and “thank you”. He’s like a man who wants with every line to make sure you understand he is very sorry about what he has to do, but if we all just chin up we can get through it together.
So Tally bluffs and improvises wildly trying to resolve the standoff and find out where the DVD is. Inside, the Kellys come up with no workable solutions, little Tommy crawls around in some amazingly large air ducts, and Mars just keeps getting freakier – he tries to woo Jennifer by glaring at her all moon-eyed and crazy-sad, like a guy who has worn out a VHS copy of The Crow. By the end of the movie he has been morphed into a near-operatic hybrid of a John Woo action hero and one of the monsters from Aliens.
I kept thinking in these patchwork referential terms; each sequence of the movie feels significantly different from the one that came before. It’s like director Florent Siri wanted each to feel like a great movie he liked even if the pieces didn’t suture together.
But helicopters buzz around and uniformed people bark orders at each other and everyone generally does their hysterical best. Save for the baffling Mars I liked the acting – Jimmy Bennett as Tommy doesn’t look like the usual Culkin-spawn child actor but a genuinely gawky and frightened little kid. He doesn’t, however, look like he ever came from the loins of Kevin Pollak – the children look like they had two different mothers, and two different fathers while they were at it.
Willis covers up his natural cocksure-ness and navigates the movie successfully but without making any special impression. It’s hardly a leap for him on the order of 12 Monkeys to play a cop with a troubled marriage and a child in jeopardy, but movie stars don’t make projects like Hostage to stretch.
The double-hostage crisis creates some imaginative worst-case scenarios, and I wish more time could have been devoted to Tally’s plate-spinning efforts to keep the bloodshed to an absolute minimum. But its focus is too scattered for that, too excited about all the possibilities contained in being a hostage movie to serve its own story to the best of its ability.