00:00Charlotte Ritchie from BBC's Ghost is one of the hostages trapped in a hotel room in this comedy
00:05thriller. When an explosion goes off in a London hotel, influencer Charlotte Ritchie, American
00:10employee Tanya Moody, alcoholic journalist Nicholas Asprey, businessman Raj Ghatek, and
00:15security guard Luke McQueen decide to hide in one of the rooms instead of evacuating. As they
00:20struggle to figure out what has happened, they start trending on social media which only adds
00:25to their paranoia. So this is the feature debut of Jim Owens, and I do want to say that there's
00:29a lot of potential in the premise, and the way that misinformation spreads during breaking
00:33news events, and the way that people try to exploit them for their own advantage, but that
00:38needs a careful balance of tone and biting satire, and hostages badly misses the mark. Hostages
00:44greats from the very beginning, opening with a long montage of people playing on their
00:49phones, including Ritchie setting up a ring light at the bar, and even after the explosion
00:54happens, people recording selfie videos of themselves while they're evacuating. It's
00:59very obvious and heavy-handed, and that one note is pretty much going to be the same one
01:04it's going to be hitting for 90 straight minutes. It doesn't help that the premise of a bunch
01:08of random strangers deciding to hide in a hotel room feels strained from the start and
01:13only gets more contrived from there. Much of the cast are regulars of British TV comedies,
01:18alongside Ritchie who got Moody from Marland and Asprey from Alma's Not Normal, and the characters
01:23are such exaggerated caricatures trying to act funny that they quickly become obnoxious. Ritchie's
01:29character is the most loathsome of all, and functionally the antagonist, who literally
01:33cannot stop posting on social media if her life depended on it. The emphasis on Twitter
01:38already feels dated, but especially when she sees her follower count rising and she gets
01:43a retweet from Rita Ora which goes straight to her head. A slither of credibility is given
01:48by having newscaster Simon McCoy play himself, but there's no escaping that this feels like
01:52the premise of a bad ITV2 sitcom episode tirelessly stretched out to feature length that fails
01:58to capitalize on its common opportunities, like a broken air conditioner turning the heat
02:02up in the room. Oh, and it throws in a twist that you can see coming right from the very
02:06start that should have been the final punchline, but just stretches it out for another 20 minutes.
02:11I certainly felt like I was being held captive having to watch this lot, and I didn't laugh
02:15once during hostages, so clearly the jokes evacuated the building like everyone else.
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