Here’s an elevator pitch to have you sputtering out your coffee. Imagine if Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron were forced to team up to fight international terrorists threatening their families – whilst also engaging in their own high-stakes game of cat and mouse?
The twist with Hostage is that the leaders of the UK and France are not a tweedledum-tweedledee pairing of middle-aged fuddy-duddies but the charismatic duo of Suranne Jones and Julie Delpy – overachievers who each run headlong into an immovable object when they find themselves facing off across a conference room.
Hostage, it should be pointed out, is incredibly silly. It is one of the least plausible things Netflix has put on the screen since the streamer tried to sell us west Cork as a latter-day Darby O’Gill hellscape in the appalling Bodkin last year. Given its flimsiness, its appeal rests 100 per cent – more if possible – on the star power of Jones and Delpy, who just about deliver in the face of daunting odds.
Jones is Abigail Dalton, the newly minted British prime minister. Or so we are told. In truth, she seems a bit introverted and skittish for someone who has ascended to the highest office in the UK. Where is the cold glint of steel in her gaze? The whiff of mercurial calculation hanging over her like a heat haze?
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Delpy, by contrast, entirely convinces as gimlet-eyed French president Vivienne Toussaint. That said, you wonder if there isn’t some latent Anglo-Saxon prejudice here, with the morally pure Brit up against the Machiavellian European mainlander. Plus ça change and all that.
The story kicks up a gear when Abigail’s husband (a well-meaning idiot played by Ashley Thomas) is kidnapped while working in a war zone in a former French colony. The obvious question is in what reality would the spouse of a serving PM be allowed to place himself in such clear and present danger? But let’s not be detained by plausibility. What matters is that Dalton needs Toussaint’s help to extract her hijacked hubby. This, it seems to her, is why French special forces were invented. But, slippery Eurocrat that she is, Toussaint demands her pound of flesh – while also leaving herself open to manipulation by shadowy third parties.
It will come as no surprise to discover that the French leader’s weakness is a sexual indiscretion, whereas that of Abigail is loyalty to her husband. Nor is it shocking to learn that Hostage is the creation of a British screenwriter. At least he hasn’t thought to include any Irish politicians. Given the enthusiasm with which Hostage chucks about cliches about the French, it would no doubt have the Irish delegation arriving with pigs under their arms, rosary beads dangling raggedly from their pockets.
Jones and Delpy can’t be faulted, however. They throw up sparks against each other, and it is genuinely great fun to see these two powerful screen presences facing off. If only they’d been persuaded to cross paths in less flimsy circumstances.
