The Negotiator Review
by Curtis Edmonds (blueduck AT hsbr DOT org)August 28th, 1998
The Negotiator
by Curtis Edmonds -- [email protected]
They didn't have a lot of the scenes I wanted to see in The Negotiator, but there was one scene I particularly missed. It was the scene where Chief Deputy United States Marshal Samuel Gerard is sitting on his couch, watching the mayhem of the movie on WGN. I envision Gerard putting his feet up, taking a puff on a confiscated Cuban cigar, and intoning: "What a bunch of amateurs."
The way this movie was advertised was as a cat-and-mouse game between two professional hostage negotiators. Samuel L. Jackson as framed cop Danny Roman versus Kevin Spacey as outside negotiator Chris Sabian. It all looked so promising, with two of Hollywood's best actors going mano-a-mano in a Chicago-themed action flick, just like in Jeb Stuart's script for The Fugitive. And throw in a bit of Stuart's Die Hard script, with Jackson as the lone hero cop trapped in a tall building... it looked very, very promising. What a shame that The Negotiator is in the hands of amateurs.
The premise of the movie is that it's a duel between the hostage negotiators. Jackson, wrongfully accused of theft and murder, snaps and takes the police department's internal affairs department hostage. He calls on Spacey to serve as his personal negotiator (after a very funny scene where he pokes holes in the confidence of the poor schmuck originally designed to talk him down). So, this ought to be a great battle of wits, right? Right?
The Negotiator would have us believe that the most important skill of a good hostage negotiator is lying. You can make a good movie about lying -- say, House of Games or The Sting -- but it's hard to make a good action movie about lying. And especially here, where all the lying concerns finding the evidence that will free Roman of the charges against him. We already know he's telling the truth, and we don't much care about the scandal, so that's just not interesting.
What I would have like to have seen is a little more of the tricks of the trade being displayed. The only time we really see the Chicago PD being sneaky is when they try to snake mini-cameras to view the hostages -- Jackson sees them, as any reasonably observant person would, and yanks them out. There's nothing really improvisational or imaginative about the whole setup. (Contrast the imaginative hostage negotiation between Bill Murray and Jason Robards in Quick Change.) Throw in a couple of unrealistic plot twists (totally unworthy of Sam Gerard or any other law enforcement professional) and what you end up with is a mess of a movie.
Jackson's best performances have always come when he has a character to play that's basically unappealing. For example, both Jules in Pulp Fiction, and Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown were both very bad, very unlikable dudes -- but the audience was sympathetic to both of them, in a way, because Jackson's sheer force of talent makes them magnetic. Danny Roman is meant to be appealing -- the audience has to be on his side the whole movie -- but he's never magnetic. There's only one little scene where Jackson is allowed to go over the edge into unlikability -- and it's a cheat. Not a great performance, although it's many, many fathoms better than what we saw when he was at the bottom of the ocean in Sphere.
If Jackson doesn't live up to his potential in The Negotiator, Spacey steps all over his and grinds it into the mud. Spacey is a great actor, capable of a wide range of parts, and what they've done here is put him on Macho Mountain without any rope. Other than a too-long cutesy scene between his wife and daughter that's completely contrived to establish his credentials as a negotiator, Spacey is made to participate in scene after scene of macho posturing. He's consistently in screaming matches with Jackson and the cops. His voice must have been really, really hoarse after production was completed.
The rest of the cast is a tribute to the majesty and power of typecasting. John Spencer, so good as Harrison Ford's cop friend in Presumed Innocent, is the chief of police here. The late, great J.T. Walsh plays an oily creep who knows more than he's saying. Ron Rifkin plays a devious-but-bland cop in the same manner as his guest turn on ER not too long ago.
Speaking of ER, here's a memo for Anthony Edwards: make sure your agent sees this movie, because you don't want to end up like David Morse. Remember him? He was the sensitive-yet-tough doctor who led the ensemble cast on the hospital drama St. Elsewhere. Unfortunately, he's only able now to get parts as mindless toughs for some reason. Something to think about, OK?
There really isn't much that wrong with The Negotiator, and I don't want to talk you down from your stadium seat. It's perfectly serviceable, mindless summer movie entertainment. But it could have been so much better, and that's a shame.
Rating: B-
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Curtis Edmonds
[email protected]
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