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Shortly after my
screening of Hostage, a representative of the film’s distributor came a-callin’,
hungry for quotes to use in an ad campaign.
I chewed on it for a second or two, and said, “I think
I can honestly state that Hostage
is the best work Bruce Willis has done in years.”
This, of course, is more of a backhanded criticism of
Willis’s 21st century ouvrage
(at least until Sin City
hits screens). But
I also uttered that fairly surprising sentence with my tongue
placed relatively far from my cheek, as well, since Willis
showed enough spark in a couple of scenes to make audiences
forget about him selling what was left of his soul for that
quick paycheck called The
Whole Ten Yards.
Hostage’s
eye-catching credits lead into one of those scenes, in which
we’re given a little background into Willis’s Jeff Talley, a
Los Angeles hostage negotiator with a flower-print shirt, long
hair, scraggly salt-n-pepa beard, and enough stones to remain
horizontal for most of the bartering surrounding a domestic
disturbance-turned-hostage situation (in fact, he reminded me a
lot of another crazy, bearded genius with the same initials – Smile!). The scene goes
down badly, though, with Talley’s hands literally covered in
the blood of the innocent people he was unable to save.
Oh, I should mention this: If you don’t like bad movie
clichés, Hostage is
the wrong film for you.
One year later, Talley
is the chief of police in small-town Bristo Camino, which I
think might be somehow related to Eric Forman’s car (Willis-->Demi-->Kelso-->Eric?).
Aside from having a family who hates him, Talley is
loving life, particularly his less stressful job.
Less stressful, that is, until three delinquents decide
to pull off a smash-and-grab so they can make off with a luxury
SUV. You know,
because the kids love SUVs.
The smashing and grabbing doesn’t go well, and the
three teens find themselves trapped in a mansion whose security
system has locked down the entire property. The problem becomes full-blown when a cop responding to the
silent alarm is shot and killed.
So Talley is back in the
shit, but he doesn’t yet realize how deep he’s wading in the
crapulence. There
is much more to Hostage’s
plot, but it’s all too silly to talk about here. Instead, let’s discuss how one of the kidnapping victims
slides through the mansion’s ventilation ducts like a greased
Groundskeeper Willie. Or
we could shoot the breeze about the ringleader of the crime
syndicate triptych (Six Feet Under’s Ben Foster) transmogrifying himself from a dumb
stoner with a denim jacket to an indestructible monster not
typically found outside the horror genre.
If there’s one thing I
can say about Hostage, it’s that director Florent Emilio Siri loves him some
slow-motion. If Hostage was played at normal speed, I think it might cut the running
time to about 18 minutes. This
is strange because Siri’s previous directorial credits are Splinter Cell videogames. I’ve
played Splinter Cell,
and I don’t remember any slo-mo at all.
For this, maybe we should look to screenwriter Doug
Richardson, the powerhouse behind the non-award-winning comedy Welcome
to Mooseport. His
adaptation (or adaption,
if you’re Adam Sandler) of Robert Crais’s novel makes Hostage
every bit as riveting as The
Negotiator, which wasn’t at all riveting.
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for
strong graphic violence, language and some drug use |
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