Hostage

Hostage (Director: Florent Siri)

Siri is the first director I know of that came from video games. His best-known work is from the Splinter Cell series. Hostage is based on the novel by Robert Crais.

In January, we had the B-movie Assault on Precinct 13, which was a pleasant early-year surprise, and now we have a movie here in much the same vein. Bruce Willis plays former hostage negotiator Jeff Talley, who after a hostage situation gone wrong becomes a police chief in LA suburb Bristo Camino. Yet, he just can't shake the past when three young thieves (Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman, Ben Foster) break into one family's upscale home hoping to bag some serious cash. When alarms alert the police that something is wrong, and crazy-ass thief Mars (Foster) shoots a cop, the thieves decide to hold the family inside hostage.

Oh, but there's more problems. There's a gangster outfit looking for a DVD with important information that father Walter Smith (Kevin Pollak) has made, and the thieves have thrown a monkey wrench into their extraction of it. The gangsters also kidnap Talley's wife (Serena Scott Thomas, sister of Kristin) and daughter (played by Willis' actual daughter, Rumer), so Talley has to play a tough negotiation game with the petty thieves and the gangsters, whose idea of what can and can't happen during this situation often conflict with each other. At some point, Smith's son Tommy (Jimmy Bennett) breaks free and navigates the house's inner passageways to get important items while evading danger--scenes reminiscent of Die Hard. Meanwhile Smith's daughter Jennifer (Michelle Horn) is tied up waiting for rescue.

The pull-and-tug of this situation makes for a fine time-waster, and Willis is clearly in his element as an action star. These are the types of action movies I love, too. The closed-space, limited-maneuverability type of picture that Die Hard made famous and derived most of its great action. Also, Ben Foster is very good as the psycho here. When people play psychos, it seems like it's time to let their eyes bug out and get very intense with every line reading. Foster doesn't do that, taking a more silent approach, barely saying anything (which allows kudos to screenwriter Doug Richardson, who wrote Die Hard 2 and the upcoming Die Hard 4.0). He lets his actions do the talking, and he's quite memorable. It should also come as no surprise that action producer Mark Gordon (Speed) is a part of this.