Mean Negotiator

Hollywood's perfect hostage flick recipe: Take one small, preferably pre-teen child from a powerful family, mix together with violent psychotic and add gun - large sawn-off if at all possible. Let simmer for 10 minutes. After blending in a back plot explaining said pyschotic's reason for revenge, now add the essential ingredient, a traumatised negotiator turned local cop. Can be substituted with vigilante father of small child if absolutely necessary. Serve with a garnish of verbal pyrotechnics, a sharp shooter or two and enjoy. And so Bruce Willis' new film is created. Spotting the huge hole in his CV where 'hostage negotiator' should be, Willis is following hard on the heels of many a tinsel-town luminary in that ever reliable staple of Hollywood thrillers, the hostage crisis. Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson slugged it out in The Negotiator, Mel Gibson took them all on in Ransom and even Russell Crowe got in on the game by practising his persuasive skills - along with his seduction techniques - in Proof of Life. Bruce meanwhile will play former hostage negotiator Jeff Talley in the imaginatively entitled Hostage based on Robert Crais' bestselling novel of the same name. Fully saddled with the obligatory guilt from a past hostage cock-up when a negotiator with a S.W.A.T. team, small town police chief Jeff suffers a real arse of a day when three hoodlums take hostage a father and his two young children. The real sticky point comes when he realises that the imprisoned father also doubles as an accountant for the Mob, who understandably want all evidence of ne'er-do-well activity in the house destroyed before the police storm in. And how will the Mob ensure this happens? By kidnapping Jeff's own family of course. Willis will also wear his producer's hat for this one but will first star in a movie entitled Me Again directed by Galaxy Quest helmer Dean Parisot, while also developing a project called Tenkiller based on a novella by Elmore Leonard and trying to nab a writer for another Die Hard instalment. Even after the box-office squibs of Hart's War and Bandits, there's no keeping this man down.