God, what an awful film.

We screened this film on Feb. 9th, and I was pretty interested to see it, since Bruce Willis doesn't work with Miramax often (their last collaboration, IINM, was Pulp Fiction), the premise, while not original, sounded good, and his real-life daughter Rumer would be playing his kid in the film.

But right from the start, the whole film put me off. It was clichéd, hokey in execution, and wildly implausible.

Right off the bat, the comic-booky CGI opening title sequence seemed an odd choice.

And then there's his appearance in the film's opening scene, or prologue. Why does he look like that? Wouldn't a hostage negotiator working with the L.A. Vice Squad look a bit more clean-cut? Here, Bruce looks like he finished Day 36 of Survivor: The Ozarks. Even odder is what happens after this scene, when he's all clean-shaven. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't he be clean-cut when he's riding high, at the top of his game, and then let his appearance go to cr@p after the initial scene?

Then you have these punks who take Kevin Pollack and his kids hostage. Who the creators of this film think they’re fooling? Am I really supposed to buy into these uneducated lowlifes as believable or scary villains? I mean, right when the lead punk shoots that cop, you know it’s over. A more scary scenario would be if he somehow managed to take the house without alerting the police immediately after doing so. In doing this, he shows himself and his two boyfriends to be stupid, incompetent, lacking in any restraint, and utterly inept as villains that would allow the viewer to suspend his disbelief. Never during this film did I ever doubt that they’d fail; the only question was how they could manage to maintain their plot for the length of an entire film.

Perhaps sensing this, the creators try to throw in a secondary villain, the organized crime figure, and here the story actually does set up an interesting rock-and-a-hard-place twist that places Bruce Willis in a situation somewhat different from the usual hostage negotiator story, but it’s marred by the heavy-handedness with which these other villains refuse to stay in the shadows, and decide to take a more pro-active part in the situation at Kevin Pollack’s house.

There’s also the annoying boy genius who seems to know of more knooks and crannies in the house than in an English muffin. I’m sure those who disliked Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation will absolutely loathe this kid. And of course, there’s the generally implausibly cutesy theatrics throughout the film, like Willis’ choice of attire when he backs up the ambulance into the house’s driveway.

What a disappointment for a Bruce Willis film.

Why in the world does the narrator in the commerical that I just saw for this film refer to Bruce Willis' adversaries as a "terrorist cell"? His two opponents are A. A trio of punks who take a man and his two kids hostage at his house, and B. Organized crime figures. Where in this movie was there a "terrorist cell"? What, do the marketers feel they just have to stick terrorists into everything simply because we're now in a post-9/11 world? Christ, what exploitative bilge.

Fire at 34th St. Laundromat 'Probably Not Terrorist-Related', Authorities Report.

Bruce Willis has done more than a few disappointing films in his career. Few were more wretched than 1988's Sunset, the second time he worked with Blake Edwards. Only the presence of James Garner as Wyatt Earp saved this film from Cannonball Run-like awfulness.