COLIN FIRTH IN

ABOUT THE FILM: The british TV reporter John McCarthy was 1985 working in Beirut, covering the kidnapping of the Irish University teacher Brian Keenan, when John himself was kidnapped and eventually put in the same "cell" as Brian. They were held hostages for more than four years - an event that was much covered in European and American media at the time. Shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than their jailers and other brit and american hostages, the film focuses on the unlikely friendship that developes between John and Brian: one an easy-going upper class brit, the other a proud irish scholar with a workingclass background. The film is a drama-documentary based on the hostage's story as told via interviews, articles and books after their releases.

MY RATING: **** I'm especially impressed by the play between Colin and Chiran Hinds. Their eyes and bodies tell the story in all its horror. [Picture to the right based on a photo originally scanned for the FoF Archive]

From a US review 1993:
If we must have TV movies based on harrowing real-life events, let them all be as good as Hostages, an account of the kidnapping, imprisonment, torture, and subsequent release of six civilians held in Lebanon during the late 1980s and early '90s. With the crispness of a fictional thriller, Hostages in its opening minutes shows us how the first of this group of hostages were taken prisoner in 1986 by members of the Muslim fundamentalist group the Hezbollah.

Hostages is not out to demonize the Middle East-and there is a strong suggestion that the Reagan administration was knowingly dealing arms to Iraq in return for the $ release of the hostages. But director David Wheatley, working from a script by Bernard MacLaverty, is most concerned with depicting the agony endured by these innocent men. Cut off from the world, regularly punched and kicked by their kidnappers for no apparent reason and left to live in a filthy room, the hostages comfort one another but also get on one another's nerves. The worst thing this TV movie could have done would be to turn the hostages into bland martyrs or ennobled victims. Instead, the script grants these men their individual, prickly personalities.

Unlike most TV movies for commercial American networks, this one doesn't have to shrink from harsh language and violence and thus gives the impression of being that much more "real." In the end, of course, the lives of these men during this period are unknowable to anyone but the hostages themselves. Hostages is based on interviews with some of them, and the film employs the usual TV-movie tricks of juggling the chronology of various events and changing the names of minor characters. Hostages is, in this sense, as misleading as any other true-life TV movie. But on a deeper level, the uniformly quiet, passionate acting and the power of its drama give it a thoroughly redeeming force. [By Ken Tucker, February 19, 1993]