Review – The Negotiator

By the end of this movie, the viewing experience feels like sitting through around ten hours of macho posturing punctuated by extra-loud gunfights. Still, this is a prime specimen of some of the tricks screenwriters like to pull to mess with the audience’s minds and stir a stultifying, motionless plot. For example, in this wrong-man tale of a hostage negotiator caught up in a corruption scandal that drives him to take hostages of his own, we have the guy who’s so obviously involved in the conspiracy that you just know he isn’t really part of it, the apparent murder that turns out not to be a murder after all, a cop who turns out to be his own informant (no kidding), and a whole host of other obnoxious little plot stunts that will someday descend to the level of cheap cliché (if they haven’t already done so). Even Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey can’t save this clinker. See if desperate