Though not a complete failure, as it does have a few great action moments and top-notch cast, Hostage never feels like a film with an actual direction in mind as it continually changes gears and flavors, moving its focus from one idea to the next with the audience trying its best to maintain interest in a story that doesn’t know when to end. It’s the kind of film that continually tries to top itself and thus never settles with one of the many endings it has on its hands until it has absolutely used up every alternative and twist up its sleeve. In the hands of the right director and structured by a writer who knows his endpoint, Hostage could have built up to a terrific, explosive ending, but instead it just pushes on and on and wears out its welcome as it attempts to do too much with too little.
To call Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) “burnt out” would be an understatement. After his last assignment as a hostage negotiator ends disastrously because of his arrogance, Talley calls it quits and takes a position as the chief of police in a quiet town where nothing ever happens beyond speeding tickets and jaywalking. Then one day, things get very loud as a trio of teenagers muscle their way into the home of businessman and father, Walter (Kevin Pollak), whose dealings are of a sensitive nature and have powerful figures pulling the strings. The teens (Ben Foster, Jonathan Tucker and Marshall Allman) knock out Walter, and tie up his two children Jennifer (Michelle Horn) and Tommy (Jimmy Bennett) as they begin panicking in the face of an encroaching police presence. Stuck in the middle of it all is Talley who wants to rescue the family, but also has a mysterious figure blackmailing him with his wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and daughter (Rumer Willis) kidnapped until he rescues a CD with sensitive data from Walter’s house.
Up until the final third, Hostage is a pretty decent thriller with enough action and suspense to keep most audiences interested. In its final act, however, Hostage goes off the rails as it attempts to wrap up all the different threads it laid out with no real sense of priority as to which should take front and center. That’s not to say it’s balanced, but that the film clearly has no sense of where it’s going even as the final act explodes with some well filmed action. What’s more, the relevance of Talley’s opening trauma seems to vanish altogether by the end as it’s revealed to be little more than a ploy to make his initial protectiveness of Walter’s son palatable. It doesn’t last though, and in the end Talley devolves into just another cardboard action hero whose kidnapped family and big heart feel like little more than sidenotes instead of powerful motivations.
Hostage was one of those films where Ben Foster proved just how far he could take a character even with rather shallow writing holding him down. From the very outset, Foster’s performance made it clear that something dark was stirring beneath the character’s already ominous Goth appearance (which to a Hollywood director or writer automatically means “troubled”). Though Director Florent Emilio Siri and writers Robert Crais and Doug Richardson seem content to use that all too easy stereotype to show right up front that Foster’s character is disturbed, the film owes much of its depth (the little that it has) to Foster’s elevation of the material. Bruce Willis does admirably as well considering that, like Foster’s character, Talley never really rises to the levels that Willis’s trademark John McClane did in half the time and with a wife who wasn’t under nearly as much duress. If the stakes are higher, we should care more, and yet seeing Talley’s wife and daughter bound and gagged never gets us to care much at all about them because we know little to nothing about who they are.
Hostage would be a much better film if the director and writer had had the insight to end it 15 minutes sooner and spend a few weeks longer on a script to give us characters who were more defined by their actions than they were by blatant stereotyping and throwaway backgrounds.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Besides an assortment of extended and deleted scenes with audio commentary options from the director, the Blu-ray boasts a behind the scenes look (which is good as the house was a fantastic place for the movie) and a feature-length audio commentary which offers nothing special.
"Hostage" is on sale August 23, 2011 and is rated R. Action, Thriller. Directed by Florent Emilio Siri. Written by Robert Crais (novel), Doug Richardson (screenplay). Starring Ben Foster, Bruce Willis, Jimmy Bennett, Kevin Pollak, Rumer Willis, Michelle Horn, Marshall Allman, Jonathan Tucker.
