Directed by Florent Emilio Siri

Written by Doug Richardson

Starring:
- Bruce Willis as Jeff Talley
- Kevin Pollak as Walter Smith
- Jimmy Bennett as Tommy Smith
- Michelle Horn as Jennifer Smith
- Ben Foster as Mars Krupcheck
- Jonathan Tucker as Dennis Kelly

The beginning of Hostage, aside from the most over-rendered and unnecessary opening credits in the history of film, shows great potential. Bruce Willis stars as Jeff Talley, an LAPD SWAT hostage negotiator. There's some nut job holed up in a house with a girlfriend and the girl's kid. SWAT snipers can take the guy down, but Willis, who is "the guy," says that no one dies today. And of course knowing what we know about Hollywood, lots of fucking people are going to die as a result of his statement. Boom, boom, boom--Willis breaks into the house to find the guy and the girlfriend dead and the kid shot and bleeding to death. The blood looked really good, and dead eight-year-old boys make me happy because I'm a card-carrying member of the culture of death. Actually, they make me happy cinematically because as a result of his massive failure, Willis leaves Los Angeles and moves to a fictional town in Ventura County. It is believable to me that having a child die in your arms as a result of your fuck up would cause a man to alter his life that drastically. Even a long-time SWAT veteran. The story picks back up in said make believe town (I'm from Ventura County and there is no Bristo Camino. There is however a Bristol Farms near Camarillo...) where Willis and his family-on-the-rocks are trying to get by. His daughter is teenaged and therefore difficult (I should mention that Rumor Willis, who plays his daughter and is he and Demi Moore's real life daughter, is the ugliest female teenager in at least twenty-years of cinema. At least both her parents know great plastic surgeons). Talley and his wife are probably getting divorced. He is the chief of police and even though it is brief, we can see he is unfulfilled in his new role and misses the hustle and bustle and blood of Los Angeles .

Enter super rich Walter Smith (Kevin Pollak). He has two children and lives in a veritable compound up in the hills overlooking the town. Fuck it; the place is a fortress. Not only does it have a panic room, but you hit one button and all these floodlights come on and metal grates drop in over the windows, etc. Three local fuck ups ranging in age from eighteenish to about twenty-three decide to follow Smith and family home to jack his Escalade. They break in and capture the family, but before they can, Tommy (Jimmy Bennett), Smith's young son, pushes a silent alarm. This causes one of Willis's deputies to go and check out the house. In a very violent slow-mo death sequence, Mars (Ben Foster), the psycho killer of the bunch, shoots her twice. Actually, she doesn't exactly die. Rather, oozing blood, she manages to claw her way down the driveway so she can die in Willis's truck. Dennis (Jonathan Tucker), the would be ringleader of the impromptu gang, is shocked by Mars's actions, but he decides to roll with it because, well, the script calls for him to do so. His enthusiasm for the killing and subsequent hostage situation is bolstered when they find four million dollars in cash. Willis calls to negotiate and Dennis demands a helicopter. Willis says he can't do that, he's not "the man," and turns the whole clusterfuck over to the county sheriff. He will not be a party to another massacre. Willis then goes to a coffee shop where he phones his wife, they make an attempt to patch things up (she's been watching him on TV for hours) and he tells her that as soon as he is done paying a call to the fallen deputy's house ("she has a kid") he'll be home for dinner and to get their life back on track. But wouldn't you know...

As Willis gets into his truck, a man shoves a gun into his back and tells him to drive. They reach a dark alley where a van backs up to his truck. In perhaps the best scene of the film, a masked mafia ninja (I know) coolly and calmly instructs Willis to put his hands through the steering wheel so he can cuff him. Then he puts Willis's seatbelt on and explains that the man in the back seat is going to reach around and hold him. Then the back of the van opens up and voila; there is Willis's wife and ugly daughter, bound and gagged. Willis goes absolutely ape shit but he is immobilized by the man behind him. The director even includes a nice shot of Willis's feet lamely kicking at the truck's pedals. But all is for not. They've got him. It turns out that Smith is not only in the witness protection program (sign me up; seriously, you have to see this house) but he still does favors for the mob. Basically, he sets up offshore accounts and tax dodges. There is a DVD in the house that the mob simply must have. Willis is to retrieve it and then his family will be released. In other words, the plot seriously thickens.

As I mentioned, Mars is a serial killer who gets of on watching people die. So, and bare with me, you've got a hostage situation in a fortified compound, SWAT teams, the mafia (who like dressing up as ninjas; who doesn't?) and a bloodthirsty killer. All that's missing is an alien invasion. Man, Hollywood... For me, the central problem with Hostage is exactly that; too much is going on. Pick a fucking genre, you know? Trying to focus on any of the various antagonists is challenging. And I'm talking about for the director, not the audience. We just get shortchanged by what could have been a really fine film. Instead, it is a half-baked mess. That said, I will admit that director Florent Siri--who has only until this film directed video games such as Splinter Cell--is extremely talented in terms of camera manipulation. Also, the movie looked fantastic. Almost every scene is saturated in strikingly rich colors and the action sequences had real snap to them. There's even a great little homage to Aliens, which, serves no actual purpose besides showing how truly silly the writer is, but is fun and well shot nonetheless. Ah, there's the aliens... Oh, and just to add to the over-the-topness of it all, it turns out that the FBI and the Mafia are one and the same. Which is OK, because Mars transforms from a jerk with a gun into a comic book villain whose weapon of choice is Molotov Cocktails. He even kills most of the Mafia/FBI guys for Willis. He also kills Dennis and his lame brother in a particularly gratifying sequence where they not only die in each other's arms, but staring into each other's eyes. Far-fetched, but nice!

I want to give special mention to Jimmy Bennett. As a generalization I hate children in films because almost without exception they are overly-cute, nasty little buggers that lower the mentality of the film by two standard deviations. Not so in Hostage. In one particularly Ruthless sequence, Tommy breaks his sister's bong, palms a piece of the shattered glass (he wounds himself), uses it to cut himself free, steals his sisters cell phone and then escapes into the mansion's massive series of air vents where he communicates with Willis. Badass little kid. The sequence where Tommy first gets into the vents is almost whimsical and for some reason and I very much enjoyed watching him scamper from room to room. Movement, as opposed to psychological depth, seems to be Siri's forte, and that's fine. However, the real problem with Hostage is that on account of it trying to be all things to all genres, we are forced to watch a thirty-minute climax where crooked FBI dudes, a Trent Reznor looking gothic serial killer and mafia ninjas all get wasted. Way too Poochie for its own good. Lurking beneath all that to the extreme! bluster is yet another solid performance from Willis, as well as a better than average supporting group of actors. I liked Hostage, I just wish I had been allowed to like it more.

Review Posted: 6.27.05