March 12, 2005 -- “Hostage” is a movie with some fine acting, and it starts out with a lot of promise, but suffers from a silly plot that gets sillier as it goes along. The plot's unbelievability also makes it somewhat unpredictable.

Bruce Willis stars as Jeff Talley, an L.A. hostage negotiator who has a very bad day in which negotiations break down in the worst way. Fast forward a year and we find Talley has moved to a smaller city where he is the police chief. But Talley's past catches up with him when his hostage negotiation skills are called upon once again. Three punks, Dennis and Kevin Kelly (played, respectively, by Jonathan Tucker of “Criminal” and Marshall Allman of “Little Black Book”) and Mars Krupcheck (Ben Foster of “The Punisher”) break into a remote house to steal vehicles. Through a series of blunders they end up holding three hostages in the home and being surrounded by police. Talley talks to them briefly before turning the case over to the County Sheriff's department.

It turns out the hostages, Walter Smith, and his children Tommy and Jennifer (played, respectively by Kevin Pollak of “The Whole 10 Yards,” Jimmy Bennett and Michelle Horn), are connected to organized crime. Mobsters take Talley and his family hostage and tell Talley he has to get a certain computer disk out of the house and deliver it to them, or his wife, Jane (Serena Scott Thomas) and daughter, Amanda (Rumer Willis, Bruce's real daughter) will be killed. This means that Talley has to find a way to take over the hostage negotiations again.

Meanwhile, in the Smith home, things are deteriorating rapidly as the crooks have knocked out Walter, tied up the kids and are squabbling among themselves. Mars Krupcheck, a young man who the Kelly brothers hardly know, turns out to be a homicidal maniac disguised under a smooth, vulnerable exterior. His soft, sonorous voice seduces the young Jennifer Smith. Mars is a very scary character. The mobsters show up with their own SWAT team to get what they want. Somehow Talley must rescue the hostages and recover the disk, while eluding the mobster SWAT team, a swarm of county sheriff's deputies, and the punk crooks.

If you think this sounds like an overly complicated set up, you've got that right. This is also a very violent film. There is a lot of blood and there are a lot of dead bodies on the floor before it is all over. In one scene, Mars walks down the halls of the house, surrounded by flames, with a burning Molotov cocktail in each hand. It is a scene reminiscent of “Barton Fink,” a film which this rivals in its darkness and violence. The extreme violence makes it unlikely that anyone would get out of the house alive, yet Talley lives on to get into yet another wild west-type shootout.

The story, which is not very believable to start with, gets even more ridiculous as the story rolls along. Characters in the film are manipulated to suit the whims of the plot. While the first half of the film has some real suspense, the second half is less suspenseful because you can see where it is heading and it strains credulity way past the breaking point. The story also loses momentum when the main villain dies.

The acting is excellent by Willis and Ben Foster, while some of the other performances are uneven. The mobsters wear masks, which limits their effectiveness both as villains and as actors. Kevin Pollak, a fine actor, is also handcuffed by the plot. He spends most of the film unconscious. That tends to limit an actor's range. When he finally does wake up there is little time for him and Willis to interact, which makes his final scenes hard to accept, since motivation is lacking.

The movie does have a number of plot twists and it does keep you guessing right up to the end. This is a good-news-bad-news situation, since some of the main reasons the plot is unpredictable are based in believability flaws and inconsistent character issues. The cinematography by Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci (“Under the Tuscan Sun”) is very good under some difficult conditions. The movie's title design, by Laurent Brett, is fantastic. The look of the film when the initial credits and the final credits are rolling looks like something out of “Sin City.” The rest of the film isn't that snazzy-looking, but it is a good-looking film, nonetheless. Unfortunately, that's all style, not substance. This film rates a C.

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Copyright © 2005 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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