July 30–August 6, 1998

movie shorts

The Negotiator

Starpower fizzles in this surprisingly disappointing thriller.

by Sam Adams

Directed by F. Gary Gray

A Warner Bros. Release

What a disappointment The Negotiator is. The premise and the cast are enough to start the saliva glands working: Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey play Chicago hostage negotiators, the second called in after the first is framed for murder and takes hostages to protest his innocence. The prospect of two actors as intense as Spacey and Jackson squaring off in a battle of wills seems like a recipe for a great psychological thriller, and when you add the direction of F. Gary Gray, who brought the tense, smart Set It Off to the boiling point, the movie should be most of the way home. But somewhere along the way, something went dreadfully wrong. The Negotiator is almost a complete waste, a fizzled rocket that never gets off the ground.

Where did The Negotiator go wrong? Most obviously: script, script, script. Promotional materials for the film trumpet that Jackson and Spacey worked with the screenwriters for several months to rework and flesh out the characters. You can only wonder how thinly conceived they were at first, since in the finished product neither Jackson's Danny Roman nor Spacey's Chris Sabian amount to much more than a few broad strokes here and there. Jackson's character in particular seems not only underdeveloped but essentially misconceived.

Early on we see Danny making assurances to his newlywed wife (Regina Taylor) that he's ready to put aside his wild ways and settle down: "Crazy's on the bus," he tells her. "And the bus has left town." But actually, Danny doesn't seem crazy enough: not enough to start taking hostages instead of trying to save them, and certainly not crazy enough to do anything dangerous once he has. Jackson would seem like the right actor to play the kind of simmering anger Danny needs, but he's oddly flat here. There's no volatility to his performance. Too bad crazy didn't stick around for the whole movie.

Since the drama of hostage negotiations comes from the fact that the hostage taker might kill or injure one of the hostages at any moment, and since we don't actually believe Danny will do either, the hoped-for confrontation between Spacey and Jackson has no spark. And since that confrontation is the heart of the movie… well, you can figure out the rest.

The gaping hole in Danny Roman's character is all the more puzzling since it seems so easy to fix. Why not show us that Roman is a good negotiator because he's more like the hostage takers than the cops around him, someone who's struggled with his own explosive emotions and kept them in check by risking his life for a living? The fixes for the script's problems seem so obvious, it's hard to believe they weren't implemented, but perhaps the relative inexperience of writers James DeMonaco and Kevin Fox (whose combined previous credits equal exactly one movie: the godawful Jack) might explain its unremedied flaws. It also might explain why it takes over an hour to put Sabian and Roman together, which is where the movie should be 20 minutes in.

The biggest disappointment of The Negotiator, though, is its silence with regard to race. That the script was developed for Sylvester Stallone might explain the lack of reference to Danny's being black, but in a movie about a high-ranking cop who is successfully framed despite his complete innocence, it stretches credibility not to mention the issue. In Set it Off, Vivica Fox's bank teller turned bank robber when a childhood friend from the projects showed up to rob her bank, and the police automatically assumed she was in on the job. Perhaps Gray didn't want to repeat himself, or perhaps Jackson wasn't interested in playing racial animosity, but it would have seemed the perfect explanation for Danny Roman's explosion that, after two decades on the police force, he felt he couldn't escape the fact that certain people would always assume he was a criminal just because of the color of his skin. Instead, we never know what makes Danny Roman tick, and The Negotiator is wound down before it even starts.