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Hostage Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for strong graphic violence, language and some drug use) Theater release: July 19, 2009 by Miramax Directed by: Florent Emilio Siri Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes Cast: Bruce Willis (Jeff Talley), Jimmy Bennett (Tommy Smith), Jimmy Pinchak (Sean Mack), Jonathan Tucker (Dennis Kelly), Ben Foster (Mars), Kevin Pollak (Mr. Smith), Serena Scott Thomas (Jane Talley) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

If Hostage were a good movie—and, despite an intriguing moral premise and some obvious skill on the part of its makers, it isn't—it would be tempting to call it the quintessential Bruce Willis movie. Like The Sixth Sense, it begins with Willis playing a professional whose faith in his own skills is shattered when a person he was trying to help commits suicide. Like Die Hard, it features a hostage who eludes his captors and makes contact with cops on the outside while crawling around in air ducts. Like Mercury Rising and The Kid, one of the most important relationships in the film is between Willis and a young boy. And like, uh, The Whole Ten Yards, it co-stars Kevin Pollak as someone with ties to the mob.

Bruce Willis plays Jeff Talley, a cop facing a very sticky, and dangerous, dilemma

Okay, so not every related film that comes to mind is a winner, but Hostage does have its strengths. For those of us who think Willis is at his best when he plays more vulnerable characters—and for those of us who have been disappointed these last few years as Willis smugly smirked his way through a string of lame comedies, with occasional detours into serious-minded, stone-faced fits of bravado such as Tears of the Sun—it is refreshing to see him play a human being once again, even in something as pulpy as this.

This time, Willis plays a police officer named Jeff Talley, and our first glimpse of him, when he is a hostage negotiator with the LAPD, does, admittedly, come across like it was scrawled on a napkin in screenwriter shorthand. Talley, perched on the roof of a building along with several other cops, is on the phone to an armed man who has taken his own wife and son hostage, and as if to prove to his fellow officers how calm he can be under pressure, Talley lies back and leisurely combs his beard while bargaining for the hostages' lives. Alas, Talley miscalculates, and the entire family ends up dead (and, gratuitously, the man who perpetrates this murder-suicide is revealed to be religious). End prologue.

Willis and his real-life daughter, Rumer, who plays his daugther in the film

One year later, Talley has shaved his head and taken a job as the sheriff of a sleepy little suburb, where he assumes—wrongly, of course—that he will not have to face such trials again. For now, the greatest tension in his life seems to be between himself, his wife (Serena Scott Thomas), who may or may not be moving out, and his daughter (Willis's real-life daughter Rumer), who resents the fact that they left the big city. But then three teenaged criminals break into a mansion, take the family prisoner, and shoot the police officer who comes to investigate the suspicious truck parked outside.

While Talley is personally involved in the early stages of this confrontation, he is more than happy to let more experienced officers from outside his jurisdiction take over. But then something unexpected happens. It turns out Mr. Smith (Kevin Pollak), the widowed owner of the mansion, has a secretly coded DVD that certain criminals want, and these criminals don't see why a pesky little thing like a hostage crisis ought to get in the way of their retrieval of that information. So, quite out of the blue—this is one of those films where the bad guy knows exactly where to find the hero, and waits with a gun for who knows how long in the back of the hero's car—they take Talley's wife and daughter hostage and give him an ultimatum: either he gets the DVD for them, or they kill his family.

Talley and Tommy, the young boy played by Jimmy Bennett

Hence the film's intriguing moral dilemma: Will Talley, who resumes command against the advice of his colleagues, put retrieving the DVD ahead of saving the hostages? Will he possibly sacrifice another family in order to save his own?

This scenario has a lot of potential, but the film fails to exploit it, for several reasons. First, the only member of the Smith family whose life is directly jeopardized by Talley's actions is the father, who seems like a loving dad and all but whose innocence in this whole situation is, to say the least, debatable. Second, Mr. Smith's young son Tommy (Jimmy Bennett, who previously played the kid in the Flash costume in Daddy Day Care) is such an intelligent little tyke—he crawls around in the house's secret passageways, while talking to Talley on a cell phone—that he seems more like someone who is helping Talley to get out of this sticky situation, rather than someone who might be trapped within it.

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