Hostage

In the Netflix series Hostage, a high-stakes crisis unfolds when a group of armed assailants seizes a prominent public figure and demands steep concessions, thrusting a seasoned negotiator into a tense battle of wits. As the clock ticks, the negotiator must navigate complex motives and hidden agendas to defuse the situation and save lives, all while facing mounting pressure from authorities and the media.

Hostage Review

When you ask yourself if our subscriptions are Worth it, remember that I sat through four hours of this so that you wouldn’t have to.

                   

Hostage is a sloppy and sputtering thriller that suffers from Star Wars Prequel Syndrome, prattling on endlessly with limp and predictable dialogue and unoriginal soap opera drama all delivered by unbelievable women in roles meant for men. Other than that, it’s great.

A gimmick is rarely sufficient in and of itself to carry a narrative, and the modern gender swap is particularly weak tea to carry a four-hour story. Yet, that’s exactly what Hostage attempts to do. It gives us the same old, a world leader’s spouse kidnapped for ransom/political vengeance by a military person/group who was wronged by financial cutbacks and a diminished sense of importance, drama that we’ve seen a million times. Only this time, women are the political leaders and men play the damsels in distress and tawdry love interests.

It’s all so lazy and tedious, and none of it is helped by its uneven pacing, MIDI-generic music, watercrest dialogue, and vomit-inducing handi-cam cinematography.

Whatever Netflix paid for Hostage was too much.

WOKE REPORT

It’s Our Right to Give Away Your Money

• The virtues of socialism are loudly and frequently lauded, despite them concurrently failing the film’s populace.
  • National Health Care and its supreme importance are a regular refrain, despite the fact that in the show, the UK citizenry is in an uproar at the NHS’s current mishandling.
    • This, along with the mismanagement of other social services, is used as a catalyst to incite Londoners into rioting.
    • We’re told several times that the lady Prime Minister promised to “gut” the British military and redirect the funds to healthcare. The show’s perspective is that this is a good thing.

DEIrby

• The diversity is on the high side.

Flock of Birds

• This show has more chicks than Old MacDonald, and they are all in positions of authority… except for the main villain, of course.
• The PM’s main political opposition is shockingly an aggressive and heartless man.
• In one of the final fight scenes, a man must fight for his life against a woman. She’s a trained soldier, and he is not, but he is young and fit. Brace yourself,
  Spoiler

  she absolutely dominates him, finally putting him in a choke hold with the intention of breaking his neck. He emotionally refuses to fight back…because. Ultimately, his emotionalism convinces her to let him go.
• The French President is shown to have
  Spoiler

  had an affair with her much younger stepson. Do you get it? She’s like a traditional male politician bedding a younger woman, only this time she’s a she and the younger woman is an attractive, idealistic young man. Do you get it? It’s the opposite.
  BRILLIANT!

Being Right is So Wrong

• The show’s main villain is being on the right.
  • The French president begins the series as a coldhearted politician who has lost her way as she’s fallen deeper into line with her husband’s right leanings. In fact, her entire redemption arc is finding her way back to moral purity through recommitting herself to leftism.
    • One of her biggest sins is wanting a secure border.
    • Her stepson tells her, “They’re pushing you to the right. They all are. You’re better than this.” The implications are pretty clear.
  • Spoiler

    White military men, one whose grievance is his reduced budget, are the human villains.
  • Immigration is a major catalyst. Specifically, illegal immigrants.
    • Unsurprisingly, those who are against it are painted in a poor light.

Freedom FROM Religion

• France has some pretty stringent Church and State separation laws, but the French president says that those laws disallow her to go to church. Even for a godless society like France, this is blatantly false, but that didn’t stop the hack writers from putting it in for no other reason than to mention the separation.

Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Seen

• In the closing minutes of the climax,
  Spoiler

  the daughter manages to pick up a handgun, which she aims at the knife-wielding man who, moments before, was trying to murder her father. The moment she takes aim, her parents yell out in a panic for her to stop (you know… because guns are bad). As the still-armed man who kidnapped both her father and her, tried to blow up her mother, and just slashed her father’s midsection with a dagger, slowly and menacingly approaches her, her mother tells her to put down the gun because “the police will be here any second.” They still haven’t yet entered the building, by the way, and the showdown is taking place on the second floor of a massive home.
  Can you imagine being this twisted in your thinking?