HOSTAGES is a ten-part Israeli thriller series, later remade for the American market. The plot sees a surgeon in Jerusalem scheduled to perform surgery on the Prime Minister when her family are taken hostage by masked men who demand that she kill the PM during the operation. It's a corker of a concept...for a film. As a series it works less well because it has to sustain this relatively simple idea for hours, which leads to increasingly absurd plot twists. Inevitably every member of the family and even of the hostage takers has a back-story which has to be unpacked but as time goes on it all becomes too obviously artificial a method of stretching the drama out. Getting all this drama in also means that the hostage-takers have to act in the most absurdly unprofessional fashion, wandering off and letting the hostages have access to electronic devices and unwatched rooms. The final revelation is also disappointingly petty; I'd hoped for more from a Middle Eastern thriller but instead it's the usual domestic heart-string-pulling nonsense. The actors are good enough and the setting is unusual but it's a television series which would have made a better film.
Review of Bnei Aruba
