Hollywood makes a lot of dumb movies these days, but every so often they outdo themselves and make something really dumb that has you wondering how it even got started at the studios. Hostage, by rookie director Florent Emilio Siri, is one of those movies.

Bruce Willis plays Jeff Talley, a once-praised but now-disgraced hostage negotiator. After a hostage-taking incident goes wrong and an entire family ends up dead, he retreats to a quiet California city where he hopes for a life without crime. He wants out of the tough stuff. That abruptly ends, though, when three young thugs show up in a stolen pickup truck and, through a series of events that can happen only in the movies, take a rich family hostage.

To tell you any more would be to give away some of the movie’s supposed spoilers -- that is, if you even plan to see this overwrought, wretched mess. It’s the work of a filmmaker who doesn’t know the meaning of the word subtlety and thinks that to make something gripping it has to be loud and in-your-face.

Admittedly, Hostage has one interesting twist -- one -- that could have made the film somewhat interesting, but it’s completely wasted with carelessly thrown-together scenes and clichéd images. And when the filmmakers aren’t trying to impress you with whizzy camera angles and graphic images, there’s an overbearing music score that tries to ramp up the intensity almost every minute, like putting a punctuation mark on the end of every sentence to make it seem exciting! It’s not. In fact, the movie’s long, repetitive and boring.

Hostage has been released early in March to capitalize on its big-name star Bruce Willis and to rake in a few bucks before better movies come along. Skip this one in the theaters, and pass on by when it soon hits the video shelves. Hostage is horrible, but it is to be hoped that Willis, a generally good actor who has appeared in many fine films, will turn his talents again to films that entertain us without assaulting our senses.

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