TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Hostage' and 'Travelers & Magicians'




Hostage
(dir. Florent Emilio Siri)

Bruce Willis is finally back doing what he does best: taking a beating.

Yes, Bruno excels in stories that heap abuse on his magnificent bald pate. His best work tends to show up in films like "Pulp Fiction," "Unbreakable" and "12 Monkeys," when his characters are backed into corners, tormented into action.

And in that regard, Willis has never been better than he is in "Hostage."

Florent Emilio Siri's thriller wedges a cop between the mother of all rocks and hard places. As hostage negotiator Jeff Talley, Willis has to save a white-collar criminal (Kevin Pollak) and his family after their high-tech mansion is hijacked by two idiot brothers and a psychopath (Jonathan Tucker, Marshall Allman and a wonderfully loony Ben Foster).

Now, that would be plenty of plot for a normal siege film -- but Talley also has to deal on the sly with a second, far more professional group of kidnappers. They've taken his wife and daughter hostage, and their ransom is a DVD that Talley has to steal from the mansion, right under the noses of the cops surrounding the house.

Willis gives a performance here that we haven't quite seen from him before. He drags the sort of character he plays in films like "The Sixth Sense" into an action setting. The result is a tough but frightened guy -- someone who can kick down a door, then burst into wide wales of tears when he finds a dead body inside. Willis isn't playing a hero; he's playing a man.

Director Siri ("The Nest") is mostly successful at spinning all the plates in the plot- and character-choked script. He does what all great siege-film directors do: He clearly sets up the geography of the problem, but he also makes the film about something. (There are a lot of men negotiating in "Hostage," but several of those negotiations are with wives and children.)

He also shoots the movie with devastating flair. Siri loves to film human faces -- particularly when they're in their death rattles -- and between some absolutely smokin' set pieces, he lets actors indulge strange little moments, as when Willis obsessively combs his beard or Foster offers a tied-up kid a cigarette. The movie's best scene is a quietly creepy negotiation, as a kidnapper purrs in Talley's ear as he quietly clicks Talley into a car seat, handcuffs him to the steering wheel, and puts a hammer lock around his neck -- all so the kidnapper can safely show Talley something horrible.

"Hostage" isn't a total success; Siri finally drops a couple of those spinning plates in the film's final third. Tucker and Allman are fairly bland as the criminal brothers -- Ben Foster eats them for breakfast -- and a network of air ducts and tunnels in Pollak's house becomes a little too convenient. Also, as in "Collateral," bystanders and police officers (and logic) tend to vanish so the film's final confrontation can take on iconic, almost supernatural proportions. It's artful, over-the-top filmmaking, but it lacks the satisfying dramatic heft of, say, "Die Hard."

Given the movie's considerable strengths, this feels like a surprisingly minor beef.
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Travelers & Magicians
(dir. Khyentse Norbu)

Dondrup is bored.

This shaggy-haired Chinese official (played by Tshewang Dendup) is stationed in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan -- in a lazy, remote village where archery contests are the hot entertainment among howling old men, and the relaxed, Buddhism-inflected pace of life is quietly driving our hero bonkers. Dondrup wants to go to America, where, he says, he can make more money picking apples than he does as a government flunky.

When he gets word that he can get a U.S. visa if he makes it to another town in three days, he straps on his white sneakers, puts on an "I [Heart] NY" t-shirt and hits the road. But he quickly gathers traveling companions who slow him down. Among them is a lovely paper-seller's daughter (Sonam Lhamo) and a dramyin -strumming monk (Sonam Kinga) who tries to plant seeds of doubt in Dondrup's mind by telling him an elaborate parable about the perils of a daydreaming magic student (Lhakpa Dorji).

"Travelers & Magicians" juggles scenes of Dondrup's road trip with a re-enactment of the monk's increasingly bizarre parable. It's directed by Khyentse Norbu, the Bhutanese lama who also helmed "The Cup," and it's being billed as the first feature film shot in the Kingdom of Bhutan. Norbu and cinematographer Alan Kozlowski certainly make the most of the scenery; Dondrup's obsession with getting to America seems unbearably trivial when you see a shot of him swallowed by the gorgeous Himalayan landscape as he listens to a boom-box by the side of the road. (Imagine Gimli strapping on an iPod during one of Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" helicopter shots, and you're starting to get an idea of just how silly this looks.)

The movie itself, like the monk's story-within-a-story, is something of a parable, and a very simple one, at that: The chain-smoking Dondrup slowly awakens to the beauty surrounding him as the monk bombards him with gentle homilies like, "Maybe your dreamland isn't as far as you think."

The beauty and simplicity of this awakening is as seductive as the sweetest possible propaganda; frankly it grates a little against the scenes devoted to the monk's parable, which take on a psychodramatic edge when the student stumbles on an old hermit and his hot young wife (Deki Yangzom) in the wilderness.

Nevertheless, the film works a slow magic. Norbu's modest ambition is to punch holes in its lead character's modest ambitions, and it goes about this task in a manner that, somehow, leaves you feeling full of sunshine.

Now if I could only get to Bhutan....

Savage humanity
Bhutanese
(The Oregonian, March 11, 2005)


Posted: Fri - March 11, 2005 at 12:01 AM        

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