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PLOT: Bruce Willis stars as Jeff Talley, a hostage negotiator. When teenage thugs take hostages at a rich man's house, Talley has his hands full trying to outwit two sets of bad guys and save two separate families. He's a busy guy.
For a movie loaded up with ugly killings and brutal violence, Hostage sure is pretty to look at. While there is nothing new under the sun in the world of storytelling -- no, not even in a Bruce Willis movie, we promise you -- the visuals in this one will grab and keep your attention. Filmmaker Florent Emilio Siri and cinematographer Giovanni Coltellacci have made everything old look noir again.
Bruce Willis stars in Hostage as a police hotshot in Los Angeles. The movie slams into action from the get-go, opening with a tense domestic incident, a deranged gunman, and police sharpshooters.
Things don't go so well.
Willis' character attempts to distance himself from hostage work. He moves to a small, peaceful town and works as the chief of police. Maybe he can put all that hostage stuff behind hi- ... dammit!
There's a hostage-taking right in the small town!
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A trio of teenaged thugs is holding a rich guy and his kids hostage. Willis attempts to remove himself from the situation, but then things get complicated.
The rich guy being held hostage is actually a crooked accountant. This means serious, mob-type killers have an interest in the outcome of the hostage situation. Furthermore, they wish to enlist Willis' help in their cause, which they manage to do by threatening him and menacing his family.
And even further furthermore, the teenaged thugs who started all this include one fledgling psycho killer. So things are bad all around.
Willis has to spring back into action, using all the hostage negotiator skills and whatnot he'd hoped never to use again.
But there are so many to save, and so little time and blah, blah, blah and woof.
Hostage is hugely, inventively and enthusiastically violent. In this film, it isn't enough to see a cop shot at close range -- you get to watch her fall in slow motion and then drag her bloodied, dying self down a long driveway as she tries to get help. Yerghhh.
Other people are pistol-whipped, children are tied up and gagged, folks are stabbed, set on fire, pushed to their death and blown away en masse.
The pace of the thing is ferocious and the tension is overwhelming, all thanks to the filmmaker -- who also, to his great credit, gets Willis to keep the eye-narrowing and knowing looks to a minimum.
The only time Hostage stalls is when Mr. Willis is required to emote, which, frankly, causes viewers to laugh out loud with the usual mean-spirited delight. But even all that just gets swept away by the momentum of the thing. Big and chewy, this movie.
Hostage has all the usual action/adventure cliches and a plot that is both dubious and overwrought, but with this sort of big popcorn entertainment, none of that really matters. It's a full-on adrenaline feature.
(This film is rated 14-A)