March 10-16, 2005

movies

Negotiation

on the line: Bruce Willis as Hostage's negotiator and victim.

Hostage pits action bravado against contemporary uncertainty.

by Cindy Fuchs

Hostage negotiator Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) is stuck inside one long, bad day. This, even though Hostage is structured in two parts, over a year's time, with a prologue where Jeff loses some hostages in a gruesomely violent Los Angeles standoff. "No one dies today," he barks at the cop who wants to take out the perp holding his wife and son at gunpoint. Within minutes, the scene goes awfully wrong and the film cuts to "One year later." But really, it's only more of the same: Jeff, now a sheriff in Ventura County, remains caught up, angry, miserable and cut off emotionally. He's got family troubles — his daughter (Willis' daughter Rumer) hates visiting him in the burbs, his wife (Serena Scott Thomas) is having a hard time coping — he's got loads of guilt, but he's also got nothing going on, or so he thinks. It's only a matter of minutes before Florent Siri's film launches into the next phase of Jeff's bad day.

The crisis begins with a clash between Kevin Pollack's wealthy accountant, Smith, and a trio of delinquents: psycho Mars (Ben Foster), frustrated Dennis (Jonathan Tucker) and his perky little brother Kevin (Marshall Allman). The kids' unconsidered plan to rob the Smith family, touched off by resentment of Smith's school-uniformed daughter, turns hysterical almost immediately. The Smith house is expensively secure, outfitted with cameras, drop-down gates, alarms, panic rooms, and an elaborate ventilation system which allows his small son to crawl, hide and eavesdrop, rather like a mini version of Willis in Die Hard. Smith's hyped-up security turns out to be a function of his job cooking books for a scary, big-stakes villain who is desperate to recover an incriminating DVD hidden inside the house.

To ensure he gets it, the villain (who remains hidden) kidnaps Jeff's family. He's repeatedly faced with impossible choices, deciding whom to risk as he tries to negotiate with the kids and also get around the bumbling cops, feds and press who swarm the scene with the usual overkill.

Willis and the film walk a decidedly unfine line between gargantuan action (explosions, speeding vehicles, lots of sensational shooting and brutal physical abuse) and disturbing cultural context. Unlike Die Hard, where saving the day is climactic and exuberant, Hostage is operatic and ominous. On one level, it's about the recovery of the nuclear family by violence (familiar from Die Hard and films that copied it). But it's also more tuned into current politics, narrating the failure of isolationism, as both Jeff and the smarmy, illegally wealthy Smiths imagine they can lock themselves up apart from the world.

More disturbingly and perhaps aptly, it's also about the failure of certainty. Jeff, Smith, the sinister villain, and even the nasty kids, to an extent, all believe they can control their environments and set their own terms of engagement. They're wrong, even if the film pretends the devastation and trauma they wreak might be contained.

Hostage Directed by Florent Emilio Siri A Miramax release Opens Friday at area theaters