Hostage opens with a bearded Bruce Willis as Officer Jeff Talley, hostage negotiator, 16 hours into a hostage crisis. This crisis does not end well and sets the stage for Talley emotionally for the rest of the film. This proved to be the best scene in the movie if only because Willis is rocking the grizzled beard that makes him look even more awesome!
Cut to one year later where Talley is now police chief of Ventura County having left behind the traumatic experience of L.A. However, Talley’s life of ease is about to end. The reason? Three angry teenagers, Dennis, the leader, Kevin, his innocent and seemingly slow brother, and Mars (Ben Foster), the crazy one. How Crazy? A complete psychopath who might be able to give Ledger’s Joker a run for his money, but we are never even given a hint as to why, he just is cause the movie needs him to be. That is a consistent flaw throughout the film, it rarely answers why, it expects you to accept everything just because it is.
So Larry, Moe and Curly decide they want to steal a car from a rich family up in the hills. This happens to be Kevin Pollack’s family, the Smiths; Walter (Pollack) is the dad and he has a teenage daughter, Jennifer, and much younger son, Tommy (mom, Walter quickly explains, is dead). The angry teens break into the house and things escalate way out of control within seconds. Luckily Tommy presses the silent alarm so Talley and the police are on the way. Too bad this only escalates things even further when Mars shoots a lady cop, twice!
Talley gets things into the hands of the new hostage crisis people and heads home to his wife and kids. Or so he thinks. It seems Walter has something some very mysterious men want so they have taken Talley’s family hostage in order to force him to get what they need. And what they need is a MacGuffin in the form of a DVD. What is on this DVD? What secrets lie within? Don’t try to think too much about that because you’ll never find out.
From there the film delves into all sorts of nonsense and illogical situations. Mars’ two guns seems to be packing a whole lot of ammunition for a car thief, Tommy seems to have spent years longer than he’s been alive memorizing the over-sized air ducts throughout the house and if Mars’ psychopathic tendencies seem rather unexplained, so are Dennis’ ties to the nut who he has only known three weeks.
Much of the motivation for what any character in the movie does is predicated more on the plot needing them to do that than anything that actually makes sense. And I’m sorry, but when Mars comes walking down the flaming hallway at the end double-fisting homemade Molotov cocktails in a Jesus Christ pose I couldn’t help but laugh my ass off.
The only thing that saves this from being a completely terrible film is the fine performance by Bruce Willis. Talley is obviously a haunted character and Willis gives us that in spades without going over the top, too bad the same can’t be said for most of his fellow actors. Usually Pollock gives great performances as well, but here he’s given very little to work with, even when the film reveals it’s obligatory twist.
The film is presented in 2.35:1 widescreen format and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio. The film is very well shot, I’ll give it that. Director Florent Siri knows was he doing in that department. However the audio is really bad, during the quiet scenes I had to turn the volume way up then during the big action moments it almost blew out my speakers and I had to turn it way down. This happened throughout the whole film and was very distracting.
Looking at extras, Siri’s audio commentary is not the most exciting, but his French accent is kind of fun. Taking Hostage Behind The Scenes (12 min.): Very typical making of. Extended and Deleted Scenes with optional Commentary (7 min.): In the deleted scenes you get some character development for the angry teens, this would have been important to have in the film, the rest are pretty meh. The Extended scene is one between Talley and his daughter who is played by Bruce Willis’ real life daughter, Rumer, as well as a scene that would be a spoiler if I told you about it.
Hostage is an action film that doesn’t really know what kind of action film it wants to be. On the whole it takes itself way to seriously, yet at times has scenes of sheer lunacy and all throughout lacks any semblance of logic, even within the realm of the story the filmmakers are trying to tell. Willis fans will appreciate his great performance, however I suggest everyone else find another way to spend their two hours.
Miramax and Lionsgate present Hostage. Directed by: Florent Siri. Written by: Doug Richardson. Based on the book by Robert Crais. Starring Bruce Willis, Kevin Pollack and Ben Foster. Running time: 113 minutes. Rating: Rated R for strong graphic violence, language and some drug use. Released on Blu-ray: August 23, 2011. Available at Amazon.com.
