Hostage- DVD Review

Bruce Willis' umpteenth action flick, Hostage starts stronger than his recent cookie cutter fare with a riveting opening scene and some interesting twists and turns, but eventually the ride flies too far off the rails and the flick dissolves into standard shoot-em-up fare.

The biggest problem with Hostage, the tale of a scarred former negotiator forced back into action with simultaneous hostage situations (including one with his own family), is that it's two films. For two acts, writer Doug Richardson weaves a thinking man's action tale and I kept thinking that it was a good move for Willis, as good as he may look for his age, to move away from the jumping-and-shooting kind of action (at least for believability's sake, if not for his growth as an actor). At least the first half of Hostage keeps the viewer more interested in the machinations of the plot and its characters than the action set pieces. But every Willis movie has to move to big explosions and victorious good guys eventually and when Hostage does it completely loses its way.

But those first two acts almost make the entire thing worth your time. Florent Emilio Siri, a music video director, has an undeniably interesting visual eye and Richardson knows how to keep things tense without overplaying his hand at the beginning. The plot holes aren't as gaping as your standard action fare (although one has to wonder how anyone would hang around with Ben Foster's character without knowing he's several kings short of a full deck) and, for a while, everything moves along smoothly enough to keep you entertained but not pummeled with extreme action.

The problem, and it seems to be a common issue these days, is that Siri and Richardson have no idea where to take their film. So they just launch it over the top and what started as an interesting character piece about an action hero with actual human stress and emotions, dissolves into explosions and gunfire. The writer sets up so much tension with his premise that the film becomes like a leaky tire, and actually gets less interesting scene by scene, just as the excitement should be building. Anyone who's seen an action flick knows who's going to live and who's going to die. It's the characters or the style that set some action films apart from the others and, despite a promising open, Hostage doesn't have enough of either to warrant negotiation.