No One Goes In... No One Comes Out

Jeff Talley is a hostage negotiator for the LA SWAT team, he’s currently dealing with a hostage situation featuring a Mother and her young son Sean, Jeff’s job is to get the perpetrator to surrender and he’s so confident in his abilities that at one point he’s laying on the floor casually smoking a cigarette. However before Jeff can calm the situation down things start to get out of hand, the gun man shoots himself, the Mother and Sean. Jeff rushes in to find Sean dying, he dies in Jeff’s arms.

The plot then thickens when Jeff becomes head of the hostage situation, he is captured by men in balaclavas who tell him that they have captured his family and if he wishes to see them alive again then he needs to get the men a DVD hidden in Walter’s office. However with a hostage situation and the rules of no one goes in and no one goes out it’s going to be a lot harder than expected for Jeff to rescue his family and save the hostages too…

There’s a good story here and the twist is good, the action begins right at the start which grabs your attention and keeps you glued to your seat. This really sets the pace well for the rest of the film, this is a fast paced film which was exactly what I was hoping for. I first saw this a couple of years ago on Sky Movies and have since purchased it on DVD because I enjoyed it so much.

Another thing that I didn’t like about the plot was how things weren’t completely explained even by the end of the film we were still none the wiser about certain things that the audience should have been made fully aware of by the end of the film. The DVD for example, near the beginning of the film we witness Walter having an important phone call which leads him to place a DVD in a case and ask when they want it dropped off. This makes the audience curious about what’s on the DVD and makes you believe that maybe Walter isn’t quite the devoted family man he first seemed to be. When the DVD does come into play we never actually find out what’s on it, it’s obvious that it’s important but apparently it’s not important enough to inform the audience of the DVD’s significance. Near the end of the film I was expecting Bruce Willis’s character to come through in the end and tie up all the loose ends of the movie, including what was on the DVD, unfortunately this never happens which left me feeling quite disappointed and cheated because every subplot surrounding the mysterious DVD is first-class.

The delinquents that take the family hostage aren’t played very well, Ben Foster who plays the real bad guy stands out purely for being a delusional psychopath however I found him really uncomfortable to watch, especially the scenes in which he shared with Walter’s daughter Jennifer, she’s clearly aged around 15 so to see him touching her and making sleazy advances becomes increasingly uncomfortable viewing. The other two perpetrators are incredibly irritating and don’t really have a place in this movie at all, they show no signs of a personality and I think if they all worked together as an ensemble this could have been a much better movie.

The DVD is currently available from play.com for only £3.99, one more reason you should give this a watch.