Mark Reviews Movies: ROGUE HOSTAGE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 10, 2021

Another movie in the long line of stories about a solo hero taking on a team of armed captors in a single location, Rogue Hostage is also among the most laughable examples of this very specific genre. Our hero is fine for this type of story—a veteran, traumatized by his experience in combat, who wants to protect his family and friends, while also trying to overcome the psychological wounds of his past. As for the rest of this movie, it's pretty much a joke, desperately in need of a budget, a location transplant, a villain whose motives and actions actually make sense, a cast of supporting characters with some personality, and some sense of excitement, humor, attitude, or, well, anything to give it some life.

Let's start with the hero, who is named Kyle Snowden and is played by Tyrese Gibson, an actor who's no stranger to action fodder and who provides a fairly understated performance of quiet pain here. With the minor praise out of the way, there's the rest to tackle.

Kyle, who was involved in an incident on a mission in Afghanistan of which he won't speak, now works for Child Protective Services and is raising his daughter Angel (Zani Jones Mbayise) on his own, after his wife left him. He's scolded for wallowing in misery and alcohol by his stepfather Sam Nelson (John Malkovich), a U.S. Congressman who also owns a local big box store named after him.

The store's opening day has arrived, and in a shack outside town, Eagan (Christopher Backus) shoots a campaign poster with Sam's image on it. When Sam notes that he's probably safe because he's not the President, one wonders if screenwriter Mickey Solis and director Jon Keeyes are acknowledging Malkovich's career coming full circle with this role. It's at least a little bit of trivia to keep us briefly occupied before the predictable and ridiculous elements of this story begin to escalate.

The predictable part, of course, is that Sam, along with co-worker Clove (Brandi Bravo) and a conveniently disappearing/reappearing ward-of-the-state named Manny (Carlos S. Sanchez), arrive at the store just in time for the big opening. That's also when Eagan starts his plan to hold everyone inside hostage—with a team of armed cohorts, explosives at every exit, and a suicide vest on himself.

Eagan's scheme seems to be to assassinate Sam, for a perceived transgression that put someone Eagan knew in prison, but it also involves robbery, a racist and nonsensical political statement, and the store's manager Sunshine (Luna Lauren Velez), who's locked up in the store's security room with teenage employee/shoplifter Mikki (Holly Taylor). What's amusingly fascinating about Solis' screenplay isn't only how the villain's motive keeps transparently changing in order to keep the plot wheezing along. It's also how none of his plans makes a lick of sense. Eagan keeps Sam alive for no apparent reason, even though he's willing to kill everyone else in the store. He's robbing jewelry from a place that clearly doesn't keep any real or expensive merchandise. His racism comes out of and goes nowhere, and as for his goal with Sunshine, that part just makes him seem more pathetic than any legitimate threat.

To avoid dying hard (or, if we're going to make the comparison, in a much, much softer way here), Kyle, obviously, has to hide from and fight Eagan's assorted goons. All of it just comes across as silly under the store's bright fluorescent lights, through its lengthy aisles, and with absolutely no attempt to communicate the building's geography or size on Keeyes' part. Such details aren't important for the filmmakers. Everything here is a matter of convenience.

When Kyle needs a hiding place, of course there's one under a platform in the clothing department. When he needs a weapon, of course he ends up in the store's camping section, where a grilling fork is on display. When he needs to know where his opponents are, of course Sunshine can tell him over a radio, while she watches on the security monitors. Solis even labors to establish the store's manager as a psychologist, letting Kyle know her expert opinion about Eagan's goals.

Rogue Hostage is undeniably bad, but worse, it takes itself far too seriously. That's a tonal toxin for something this blatantly cheap (An explosion, for example, is communicated by some cardboard boxes falling, although there are some digital flames later, to be fair) and unwittingly goofy.

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