Kevin Spacey and Samuel L. Jackson wonder why their agents didn't negotiate them into a better movie.

The Negotiator
A Warner Bros. Release, 1998
Directed by F. Gary Gray

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In The Negotiator, Kevin Spacey is a police hostage negotiator who must talk-down a hostage-taker who knows every trick in the hostage-negotiation playbook. It’s appropriate because this is such a by-the-book movie.

The hostage-taker in question is Samuel L. Jackson, who plays the only hostage negotiator in Chicago who’s better than Spacey. The notion of a hostage negotiator taking hostages is clever. Unfortunately nothing else in the film is.

Jackson is Danny Rollin, a hero-cop who suddenly finds his partner dead and himself the prime suspect. The case against him appears pretty strong. So in order to find out who set him up, he takes hostages. You’d think a police negotiator would know better than anyone that taking hostages is no way to resolve anything, but the screenwriters don’t allow Danny to think that logically. But they do give Jackson a lot of nice speeches. This is easily his best role since Pulp Fiction, the trouble is, much of his character’s best dialogue sounds like it’s lifted straight from that movie. (Remember the scene where Jules warns Bret not to “say ‘what’ again”? You’ll hear something very similar in this movie.)

None of the “surprise” twists in the movie are very surprising. A couple Usual Suspect-style head-spinning revelations could have made things interesting, but they never come. It’s all standard stuff. Jackson and Spacey are great, though, and it’s fun to see them cut loose when the script allows. At times, the movie plays like The Actor’s Studio rendition of Die Hard. It’s a shame to see such first rate actors wasted in such a second rate movie.

Copyright 1998