Mark Reviews Movies: HOT SEAT

Hot Seat, Lionsgate

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | June 30, 2022

It's one thing to come up with an idea for a story, but that's just the start. There are other considerations, such as the characters, their relationships, the trajectory of a plot, and how everything involving those characters and the plotting will come to some resolution. Before any of that, though, there's a more basic question to consider: Will this idea work? The core idea of Hot Seat might have worked in certain circumstances and within a certain medium, but screenwriters Leon Langford and Collin Watts clearly didn't think about how their premise would function as a movie.

Here is a movie that attempts to be a high-stakes, race-against-the-clock thriller, while confining its protagonist to an office chair within a space of about 3 square feet. The restriction is the point, since the man cannot get out of his chair or leave that tiny area, without being blown up by a pressure-sensitive bomb that has armed itself beneath the chair. That restriction is also, well, a huge restriction on what this story can hope to accomplish or even do.

Self-imposed limitations in storytelling are fine, of course, but they require a certain degree of imagination and care for detail to overcome the inherent constraints. In this case, we get to watch our hero get yelled at by a disembodied voice, acquiesce to or yell back at an absent villain, and spend most of the plot typing at a computer or spouting techno babble to justify why he needs to get back to pecking at the keyboard again.

In terms of characters, they exist for the plot. In terms of action, we have director James Cullen Bressack taking us on clichéd trips through visualizations of the cables and coding of the internet, as well as offering one instance of characters dueling in the ability to type fast. In terms of imagination, the hero's special keyboard lights up in multiple colors. Yes, the thinking behind this story skipped a pretty significant step. Actually, it skipped many more than that, but when the main gimmick is this much of a mistake, the other flaws feel relatively inconsequential.

The protagonist is Orlando Friar (Kevin Dillon), a tech whiz working at a tiny IT company. For a little bit of transparent and awkward drama, Orlando's wife Kim (Lydia Hull) serves him with divorce papers on the day of their daughter's birthday party, because he took a shift at work instead of staying home that day. He goes off to his customer service job anyway for reasons the screenplay can never justify, because the whole interpersonal conflict is entirely meaningless to anything else in this story.

Earlier in the day, a bomb went off near a local park, killing a man (The bomb has both a timer and someone activating it via remote control, which is a little nitpick but emblematic of how little thought went into the execution here). The same bomber, apparently, has rigged Orlando's office chair at work with a bomb, and let's just say it's a very good thing he doesn't sit at his desk until a specific moment, lest the internal consistency of the plot fall apart almost immediately (It breaks later, although clearly the filmmakers hope we won't notice).

The bomber wants Orlando, once a master hacker who evaded prosecution by testifying against a company that hired him, to hack into a hedge fund and, later, a company that provides digital safety deposit boxes for wealthy and powerful people (Somehow, the tiny IT firm, which only has Orlando and another employee on staff at any given moment, is in charge of the security for that company). That's how Orlando ends up spending the rest of the movie, furiously typing away while monitors display progress bars (showing the percentage of "hacking"—yes, literally on the screen—that has been accomplished), the villain gives away too much personal information and about the plan, and the police assemble outside, convinced Orlando is the bomber.

That other side of the plot follows a pair of bomb disposal experts, played by Mel Gibson and Eddie Steeples, as they investigate the first explosion, are called in for the situation at the office building, and argue with the police chief (played by Shannen Doherty) about not jumping to conclusions about Orlando. Gibson at least has a tongue-in-cheek way of playing this formulaic material, but that's not saying much.

The main problem with Hot Seat isn't necessarily one of a bad idea. It is, though, one of terrible planning and worse execution of that premise.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the DVD

Buy the Blu-ray