The driest of dry comedies, Hostages, feels tailor-made for a British audience. The attitudes and weird awkward interactions between the characters (except for David, the most useless security guard you’ll ever find), all scream ‘this is very British’.
After an explosion ata hotel near London Bridge, the majority of the staff and guests are quickly evacuated. But in the confusion, four guests find themselves holed up in one of the rooms, unsure what to do, especially when it seems everyone on social media and the news is saying it’s a terrorist attack. What follows is a series of frustrating phone calls to the police while they debate about whether they should actually be tweeting any of this.
The four main ‘hostages’ do gel together strangely well. Tanya Moodie as the American who continuously mentions her daughter’s addiction to social media, Nicholas Asbury as the pseudo leader who finds out in the worst possible way that his wife has been cheating on him, Raj Ghatak as the oddball businessman who is too comfortable getting undressed in a room full of strangers and Charlotte Ritchie, who’s social-media obsessed character, seems happiest that Rita Ora has retweeted her. Each character brings their own mess to the chaos.
There are some jokes that land, but others can be easily missed due to the understated delivery of most of the dialogue. Nothing ever seems to phase anyone, outside of the film’s climax where the story picks up in the last 5 minutes as it reveals the actual cause of the explosion. While the comedy is mostly cemented, the thriller aspect doesn’t really come into play until Charlotte Ritchie’s character starts to realise she’s losing any clout she has gained throughout the time in the hotel room. It would have been intriguing to see how this particular story thread progressed instead of wasting time watching an alcoholic have a breakdown and knock himself out on an air conditioning unit.
Despite a few moments of collective comedic madness and the odd throwaway witty line, Hostages never really breaks out from the hotel room everyone is trapped in. Heavily relying on its hit-or-miss dry comedic dialogue, the absurdity of the situation and its characters’ ability to sustain engagement, all these elements thrown together don’t quite come together. Played out on a different scale, this setup might have made a very different impact. But even at 100 minutes, the film dragged, especially when everyone mumbles their lines and barely changes their expressions. Not quite as explosive as it could have been!
Hostages is available on Digital HD on 22 December, distributed by Signature Entertainment
