Someone has to save the world. But films about hostage situations need to stop feeling they are doing us a favour by micrcosming global violence into a departmental store crisis.
In the Dutch thriller iHostage on Netflix, the terrorist is no unsure of himself he feels more like a child who won’t do his homework until he is given candy than an angry man ready to blow up an entire store in Amsterdam in this tepid albeit glossy hostage thriller with nothing new to offer.
Set in an Apple phone store the screenwriting (Simon de Waal) is so taken up with the anxieties of grabbing our attention, every moment feels like it is been hammered in from the outside. Not one moment feels organic.
Worst of all, there is no Bruce Willis in the plot, no real hero. The protagonist Ilian (Admir Sehovic) who is held hostage, remains a hapless victim throughout. Any minute we expect him to jump out of his passivity and take charge. It never happens. In this case the unexpected is not a bonus. It kills whatever little spirit the storytelling secreted to begin with.
While the terrorist Ammar (Soufiane Moussouli) doesn’t seem sure of his destructive intentions (that’s all we need: a bomber with nothing explosive in his attitude) the director Bobby Boermans seems even less certain of his intentions: does he want to make an Apple-store version of the shopping mall in Diehard? Is this a real story? If it is, then perhaps the brief is to package the grief in the way it actually happened.
So we have four potential hostages hiding in a closet with one of them named Mingus (Emmanuel Ohene Boafo) using his phone to give directions to the rescuers, and a whole bunch of shoppers hiding on the first floor who are soon enough huddled to safety by the cops while Ammar gets soft on his hostage Illian offering him water, medicine and even a chance to speak to his wife.
Is this a terrorist or Florence Nightingale in drag? Is Ammar an amateur terrorist, and does everything else in the film try to match up to his inexperience? This certainly gives a new spin to the term “real-life crime”. Every major character behaves like an understudy from Diehard. There is an aggressive female negotiator Foos (Fockeline Ouwerkerk) who keeps making the most stupid mistakes in her conversation with the terrorist.
She needn’t despair. Everyone is in this to come out looking compromised, most off all the writer and director. He should watch Srijit Mukherjee’s Bengali thriller Teka which did a far better job of portraying a desperate terrorist’s amateur goofups than this lame thriller with no thrills and lot of self important lighting and framing.
