|
Hostage
|
Movie
| Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
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Book: Hostage (2001)
Movie: Hostage (2005)
Official
movie site: http://www.miramax.com/hostage/
Premise
movie:
"Devastated by a failed hostage situation which
resulted in the deaths of a young mother and her child, LAPD
negotiator Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) exits Los Angeles for a no
profile job as chief of police in the low crime hamlet of Bristo
Camino, a small town in Ventura County. When three delinquent
teenagers follow home a family intending to steal their car, they have
inadvertently picked the wrong house on the wrong day. The trio find
themselves trapped in a multi-million dollar compound on the outskirts
of town, owned by an accountant working for a mysterious crime
enterprise. Panicked, the teenagers take the family hostage, placing
Talley in exactly the kind of situation he never wanted to face again.
Soon after, Talley readily hands authority of the hostage situation
over to the Ventura County Sheriffs Department and leaves the scene.
Meanwhile, inside the compound is digital information, which is time
sensitive and invaluable to the mysterious criminals and critical to
their enterprise. They will stop at nothing to get what belongs to
them. Talley is forced to resume the command he abandoned, where the
stakes quickly evolve into a hostage situation far more volatile and
terrifying than anything he could ever imagine."
from:
http://university.imdb.com/title/tt0340163/plotsummary
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Premise
book:
"Robert Crais is the real thing: a writer who keeps
topping himself. Last year, after eight popular books featuring
private eye Elvis Cole (including L.A. Requiem and Voodoo River), he
produced Demolition Angel, his first standalone suspense novel. Its
complex, multidimensional hero was a damaged cop
haunted by her past failures. It worked in that book, and it works even better in
this one. Jeff Talley, the police chief in a small Southern California town,
still has nightmares about the young hostage who died when he made the
wrong call in his previous job as a negotiator for an LAPD SWAT team.
Now, three smalltime punks go on the run after a grocery store robbery
and killing in Talley's town. Soon his deputies have surrounded the
house where the inept robbers have taken Walter Smith and his two
children hostage, and Talley's back in his worst dream again: until
the county sheriff's full-fledged SWAT team arrives and takes over, he
has to negotiate for their lives. Crais keeps the point of view moving from Talley to the punks to the
hostages as the situation unfolds in the house and on the ground. Then
he ratchets up the dramatic tension: there's something in Walter
Smith's house that a ruthless Mob boss wants, and he'll sacrifice
anyone to get it--which puts Talley's own family in danger. The action
speeds to its climax with the velocity of a heat-seeking missile,
which makes it almost criminal to slow down long enough to savor the
great writing. Take this passage, from a scene when Talley's
face-to-face with the man who's holding his own wife and daughter
hostage: Talley ... had stepped into the Zone. It was a place of white
noise where emotions reigned and reason was meager. Anger and rage
were nonstop tickets; panic was an express. He had been all day coming
to this, and here he was: the SWAT guys used to talk about it. You
went to the Zone, you lost your edge. You'd lose your career; you'd
get yourself killed, or, worse, somebody else.
Crais belongs in that tier of writers whose novelistic gifts
transcend the thriller category--writers like Michael Connelly, Dennis
Lehane, and James Lee Burke. Hostage is a breakout. "
from:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/
0345434498/103-5853588-8876604?v=glance
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Author:
"Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole
novels: A native of Louisiana, he grew up in a blue collar family of
oil refinery workers and police officers, and was trained as a
mechanical engineer before pursuing his dream of becoming a writer.
After years of amateur film-making and writing short fiction, he
journeyed to Hollywood in 1976, where he quickly found work writing
scripts for such major network television series as Hill Street Blues,
Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice, and L.A. Law, as well as scripting
numerous series pilots and movies-of-the-week for all four major
networks. He received an Emmy nomination for his work on Hill Street
Blues, but is most proud of his 4-hour NBC miniseries, Cross of Fire,
which The New York Times declared: "A searing and powerful
documentation of the Ku Klux Klan's rise to national prominence in the
'20s." In the mid-eighties, feeling constrained by the rigid working
requirements of Hollywood, Crais created Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in
order to deal with themes he could not readily explore on television.
His major literary influences were Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald,
and Robert B. Parker, among others. Currently, Crais lives in the
Santa Monica mountains with his family, three cats, and many thousands
of books."
from:
http://www.robertcrais.com/biography.htm
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Director:
Florent Emilio Siri
Cast:
Bruce Willis (Jeff Talley), Kevin Pollack (Mr. Smith), Jonathan
Tucker (Dennis Kelly), Ben Foster (Mars), Jimmy Bennett (Tommy Smith),
Michelle Horn (Jennifer Smith), Jimmy Pinchak (Sean Mack), Marshall
Allman (Kevin Kelly), Serena Scott Thomas (Jane Talley), Rumer Willis
(Amanda Talley), Hector Luis Bustamante (Officer Ruiz) and others.
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