Hostage
A tense situation is stretched until it breaks

"Hostage," I'm sad to report, is one of "those" movies.

That's the kind of movie that doesn't really have a plot; instead, it just continually "ramps up the action." Similarly, the story is not paced, it is "just kicked up a notch." "It takes it's premise and runs with it." And if you are annoyed by the cliches I've just enclosed in quote marks, you probably should be. They are my attempt to emulate the way these movies are constructed. They don't tell a story so much as they just endlessly quote from a now standard library of action scenes. It's all boilerplate technology.

It's a shame in the case of "Hostage" because I think Bruce Willis is always an interesting actor. Displaying just enough vulnerability to keep his character real, he is able to anchor a great many illogical and improbable action movies. But even Willis has his limits, and it was with great sadness that I watched "Hostage" slip inevitably beyond the ability of anyone to control.

"Hostage" begins with the standard scene in which a protagonist is handed a stunning shameful failure which he will invariably be forced to confront by the end of the film. Willis plays Jeff Talley, a hostage negotiator for a big city police department. As the film opens, he is already in deep negotiation with a deranged father who has barricaded his family in his house and is threatening to kill them. The negotiation doesn't go well and the family is killed, even the young boy with whom Talley was talking just a few moments before.

The film tries to alleviate some of Talley's guilt by telling us that Talley has been up for three days straight dealing with one crisis after another. This is film world shorthand to reassure middle-America that their worst nightmares are indeed completely true: It's the old "crime is rampant/we are all victims waiting to happen" scenario. Even though the film tries to give Talley an out, it is also true that in these scenes, Willis is shown sporting long hair and he projects a vaguely too-sure-of-himself breezy attitude. The visual portrait of Talley is that lack of sleep might be a factor, but his real fault is that he is probably one of those mushy-headed college-boy liberal-types who hasn't yet figured out that the only solution to "rampant crime what turns us all into victims waiting to happen" is to authorize the kill-shot when you gots the chance ta use it. Talley passes up that chance and, sure enough, disaster is the result. To its credit, another chance to use the kill-shot does come up later in a negotiation scene, and Talley, for different reasons, still refuses to take it, so perhaps the film is not as reactionary-minded as I have painted it.

The stage set, the film continues a year later, with Talley, now shorn of his liberal locks, working as a small-town police chief in an extremely sleepy mountain town. But if today's world has taught us anything it is that you can't really escape from rampant crime. And Talley's new town is no exception. Three young bored teen thugs break into a gazillion dollar fortress-like mansion and hold the family hostage. That alone could make a tight suspense film, but we have to ramp it up. So, would you believe it? That family's father just happens to be an accountant for the mob, ramp it!; there is a disk of encrypted files in the house that the mob just happens to need on an emergency basis, ramp it!; a mob strike team is assembled for the purpose of getting the disk back. As Talley's small force deals with the situation, the sheriff's department gets involved, as does the FBI; then the mob kidnaps Talley's family to force him to make sure the mob strike team gets into the house.

You'd think with all that going on, the film would be more exciting than it is. Instead, each new attempt to ramp it! only serves to heighten the falseness of the whole enterprise: the events depicted in this movie will never happen to you or anyone. No one will ever have to face this situation, so staying emotionally involved is a challenge.

The initial family under siege scenario is at least a possible real-world scenario, and, ironically, the film's tagline is much more suspenseful than the movie is — and it is much more direct: "Would you sacrifice another family to save your own?" Why did it never occur to anyone just to keep it at that brutal level of suspense? What if Talley's family was also in the house — two "families under siege" — and Talley was faced with the possibility that he could rescue one family, but possibly lose the other? That's a powerful situation: A small-town cop, honor-bound (and he is serious about honor; it means everything to him) to protect the citizens, is forced to make an impossible choice until he can thread his way through the convoluted minefield of consequences with which he his faced.

That is the stuff of drama. Come to think of it, it reminds me now of Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much," in which an American couple who, accidentally learning of a plot to assassinate an important world leader, are faced with the choice of allowing the plot to go forward, or seeing their kidnapped child killed. That is more than enough to drive any story, so why do American films always feel the need to pile on even more? Given a choice, I would much rather watch the Hitchcock film again rather than "Hostage."

I don't wish to berate this film too much; it doesn't warrant the animosity. As these sort of films go, it's a decent enough entertainment, and I've seen films that are far more egregious. The film's real fault is that it is too eager to please; it's constantly striving, and goes over the top. For example, the film seems to honor its Hitchcockian roots with a title sequence that looks like something that Saul Bass might have designed under the influence of crack. However cool the titles look, they simply are not a match for the film, but once they were created it's as if everyone agreed that they simply looked too cool to scrap for something more appropriate.

Later scenes in the film feature my personal favorite plot device: the elaborate air conditioning system comprised of conduits big enough to stage the finale of "Them" inside. The walls and floors in this house would have to be five or six feet thick to contain them, and for a system designed to do nothing but convey hot or cold air to different parts of the house, why are they designed with enough structural integrity to bear the weight of three or four people? The answer is: because the plot stops dead without the existence of such a network.

On the plus side for "Hostage": Willis, as always, is a consummate professional. Technically, the film is competently made in all departments, it doesn't have a pointless rock song score stapled onto it, and Ben Foster, as Mars Krupcheck, the most psycho of the teen thugs, manages to wrestle some depth out of his cliched brooding punk role. Most of the other actors are excellent, too. I just wish they had some better, unramped, material to work with. As it is, faced with the tempest of escalating cliches, the best they can do is to shout into the hurricane and hope they will be heard.