Hostage Game

1 out of 5 stars.

Horrible and dumb. Dumb plot. Action is horrible. Acting is tedious. Script is filled with dumb characters and just flat out terrible.

Billed as an Action Thriller this movie lacks both in spades, it's more of a drama with implied tension.

It's one of those movies with a story/plot that requires a bigger budget & a much better director.

Tyrese Gibson was a strange & poor choice as the protagonist, his rather amateur acting ability is glaringly obvious against the likes of John Malkovich,Michael Jai White & Christopher Backus.

Too many amateur actors given far to much pointless screen time & dialogue slows the story & kills any attempt at this being a thriller, pointless unrealistic action scenes are poorly choreographed & do nothing to further the plot or story.

Handled correctly with a competent & imaginative director this could have been a decent low budget thriller, instead it becomes a training film on how not to make a movie.

Tyrese Gibson was great in bby boy, 4 Brothers, waist deep, Legion, The Take, and all the F&F movies. This was not one of his better movies. The acting felt forced and sometimes very fake. No real emotional connection between any of the other actors. Which was sad because a few of them were well known. I swear I could have done a better job just winging it. I will not recommend this one to anyone and I myself will never see it again. Not even if I had extra time one my hands. 4 is me being extremely generous!

Here's another example of hiring big-name actors to entice the viewer to see a really bad film. And was it ever bad.

I get that it's newb writer Mickey Solis' first full length film screenplay, but there's no excuse to take a simple generic genre, and chop it up into incoherent nonsense where the action was laughable, and the dialogue cringe-worthy. "What's that? A bomb (over the door)". *still opens door* "be careful". Uggggh. The story lacked continuity and basic logic. The normally comfortable 93 minute runtime felt like 2+ hours with the slow pacing and dragged out filler scenes for the little amount of substance the (convoluted) story had.

What's even worse, is that you have producer and seasoned director Jon Keeyes quarterback this entire nonsense. I've seen first time amateur directors produce a film 100x better. He horribly directed the scenes, camera work, and failed miserably in directing his cast. The cinematography was bad, and the score on the worst side of the b-film grade spectrum. The sound felt distant, as if someone forgot the boom mics.

I want to say that perhaps if some of the high-paid actor budget was used to have a seasoned filmmaker go over the amateur screenplay for edits to improve it, but a seasoned director (Keeyes) could/should have fixed this mess. I feel bad for Gibson and Malkovich having this flop on their resume. It's a very generous 4/10 from me, all going to the star leads who did their best with what they had to work with.

This movie may quite literally be the worst movie I've ever sat down and willingly watched. It's sad to see John Malkovich in this. The plot is the same basic action movie plot with many unreasonable things happening and, on top of that, painfully cringe-worthy acting. If there was a way to rate this under 1 star, I would swiftly take that opportunity.