Michael Reuben
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The Negotiator (Blu-ray)
Studio: Warner
Rated: R
Film Length: 123 minutes
Aspect Ratio: 2.40:1
HD Encoding: 1080p
HD Codec: VC-1
Audio: English Dolby TrueHD 5.1; English, French, Spanish (Castillian), Italian DD 5.1
Subtitles: English SDH; French; Italian; Italian SDH; Spanish (Castillian); Dutch; Spanish; Finnish; Norwegian; Swedish
MSRP: $28.99
Disc Format: 1 50GB
Package: Keepcase
Theatrical Release Date: July 29, 1998
Blu-ray Release Date: Nov. 10, 2009
Introduction:
The Negotiator was director F. Gary Gray’s follow-up to Set It Off and is noted primarily for its pairing of Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. The Warner publicity department was so confident in the caché of its leading men that it made the twin blunders of not only giving away much of the film’s plot in the trailer, but also misleading prospective viewers about the story. The trailer is included on the Blu-ray, and when you watch it (which you shouldn’t until you’ve seen the film), you’ll notice right away that the portentous line on which it ends isn’t even in the movie. It doesn’t belong there, because there’s no place where it would fit.
I blame the marketing for the film’s relatively weak box office, because The Negotiator is a solidly crafted police drama with good action scenes and a superior cast. If it never quite rises above its genre roots, it still manages to grab your attention and hold onto it till the very end – and as the saying goes, that’s entertainment.
The Feature:
Lt. Danny Roman (Jackson) is the Chicago Police Department’s top hostage negotiator, and as we see in the standoff that opens the film, he doesn’t always do things by the book – a trait that has earned him the disapproval of SWAT team Cmdr. Beck (the reliable David Morse). But Danny gets results, and the media love him, as do his captain, Frost (a pre-Alias Ron Rifkin) and his precinct commander, Al Travis (the late John Spencer, down-to-earth as always).
The only critic to whom Danny will listen is his new wife, Karen (Regina Taylor), who wants him to stop taking crazy chances, because now he’s risking his life for the two of them. Danny promises Karen that he’ll come home every night. That promise will shortly become harder to keep than he ever imagined.
During an impromptu party to celebrate Danny’s latest success, his partner Nate (an uncredited Paul Guilfoyle) pulls him aside with disturbing news. An informant has approached Nate about money missing from the patrolmen’s disability fund, of which Danny is a trustee. The informant says the money was stolen by members of their own department, and that a member of Internal Affairs, an inspector named Niebaum, may be involved. Within days, Danny is suddenly snared in a web of planted and manufactured evidence implicating him in the disability fund scandal and other crimes. The chief investigator is the very Inspector Niebaum that Danny’s partner had mentioned, and he’s played by the great character actor J.T. Walsh in what would be one of his last major motion pictures. (The Negotiator is dedicated to Walsh, who died of a heart attack, at the age of 44, seven months before the film’s release.)
The more Danny protests his innocence, the more his fellow officers look at him with suspicion. In short order, Danny is sitting across the desk from a district attorney who orders him to come clean within 24 hours or face trial on every charge they can think of. Danny leaves the D.A.’s office brooding on his promise to Karen and heads straight to Niebaum’s office to confront him. Things quickly escalate out of control, and Danny ends up taking Niebaum hostage, along with his secretary Maggie (Siobhan Fallon, probably still best known for Men in Black) and a mouthy computer con artist named Rudy (Paul Giamatti, not yet famous but clearly on the rise). When Capt. Frost comes to the office and asks Danny what the hell is going on, Danny adds him to the group of hostages.
Now Danny sets about fortifying Niebaum’s office against the surveillance and infiltration he’s supervised from the other side on so many previous occasions. When his fellow officers make contact, he refuses to speak to them and demands that they bring in Lt. Chris Sabian (Spacey), the chief hostage negotiator from a precinct elsewhere in Chicago. No one in Danny’s precinct knows Sabian, and Sabian doesn’t know Danny. They’re all mystified at Danny’s request, but since we in the audience have been watching from Danny’s perspective, we understand it perfectly: He needs an outsider, because he doesn’t know who in his own house can be trusted.
Spacey clearly has a good time playing Sabian, from the amusing “negotiation” in which we find him just before he gets the call summoning him to the Danny Roman crisis, through the increasingly tense series of exchanges as Sabian realizes, after his arrival, that no one around him is playing by the rules. Far too many people, especially Cmdr. Beck and his SWAT team, seem overly eager to rush into Niebaum’s office, contrary to all standard procedure and without regard to the risks to Danny and the hostages. Complicating the situation is the fact that the building is federally owned, which brings two grim-faced FBI agents to the scene, looking over everyone’s shoulder and ready to take jurisdiction at a moment’s notice.
Meanwhile, Jackson turns in one of the most varied performances of his notable and extensive resumé. The character of Danny Roman is, at times, a self-assured manipulator reminiscent of Jules in Pulp Fiction or Jackson’s version of Shaft, while, at other moments, he’s as wildly emotional and out of control as Doyle Gipson in Changing Lanes or Zeus Carver in the third Die Hard – and Jackson is so skillful that he’s able to pull off these transitions within the same scene. The result is that when Danny is standing in front of a blasted-out window on the twentieth floor of police headquarters with laser sights clustering on his chest while he screams to the cameras in a news helicopter that it is the policy of the Chicago P.D. to end all hostage situations without bloodshed, you don’t know whether he’s being brilliant or crazy. No one does, and that’s the point.
To further describe the back and forth that leads to the resolution of the story would be to commit the same sin as the film’s trailer. Let’s just say that hostage negotiators come with a standard toolkit. When you get to the end of the film and look backward, you realize that Danny Roman and Chris Sabian, however different they may be as people, use the same tools of the trade. It’s all about adapting them to new and unexpected situations.
Video:
Warner has supplied another winning transfer, with deep blacks, rich colors and a pleasingly smooth appearance that doesn’t come at the expense of fine detail. This was cinematographer Russell Carpenter’s first film after his Oscar-winning work on Titanic, and while Carpenter thought he was signing on for a small police drama, the scale of the film quickly expanded once the decision was made to situate the police offices inside a skyscraper with expansive views of the Chicago River. Fortunately for all involved, Carpenter (who also shot True Lies) knew how to light huge locations so that they’d look spectacular on film. The aerial views of the building and the neighboring barge where the police establish their emergency headquarters have a weight and reality that you couldn’t get with CGI, and they’re also beautiful to look at.
Audio:
The TrueHD mix effectively conveys the sense of chaos during moments of violent activity, with helicopter passes, percussion grenades, shattering glass and gunfire from multiple points. However, there are relatively few such scenes in The Negotiator. As the title suggests, it’s primarily a film about people talking. The dialogue is clearly rendered, and Graeme Revell’s percussive score is well-presented with a good feeling of ambiance.
Special Features:
The special features are identical to those on the DVD first released in 1998 (and designated part of the Warner “Premiere Collection” in one of the many attempts at creating a premium label that studios have started and abandoned over the years). DVD special features that have not been included on the Blu-ray are several textual supplements (cast and crew bios, plus two short essays entitled “About the Story” and “Chicago Shooting”) and additional trailers for films featuring Jackson (Sphere, A Time to Kill) and Spacey (L.A. Confidential, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil).
The Eleventh Hour: Stories from a Real-Life Negotiator (6:51). A brief interview with a hostage negotiator who works for the L.A.P.D. An interesting real-life perspective on a difficult job.
On Location: Why Chicago? (16:28). Interviews with director Gray, production designer Holger Gross and producer David Hoberman on the logistics of shooting, with emphasis on how the location that Gross and Gray chose as the police headquarters where Danny Roman takes his hostages transformed the entire design (and budget) of the film.
Trailer. This is the trailer noted in the introduction. Viewing should be postponed until after you’ve seen the film.
In Conclusion:
The Negotiator’s weak spot is that the police corruption plot isn’t much of a mystery. But a mystery only works on a first viewing, and The Negotiator has what makes a film worth watching a second time: interesting characters doing interesting things. How many actors could shoot Danny the looks that J.T. Walsh gives him as Niebaum – looks that fascinate but leave you utterly unsure whether the bastard is guilty or just plain mean? Who else but Spacey could make the line, “You want something from me?” sound so casually intimidating? The Negotiator is full of such moments, and they’re what keep you watching.
Equipment used for this review:
Panasonic BDP-BD50 Blu-ray player (TrueHD decoded internally and output as analog)
Samsung HL-T7288W DLP display (connected via HDMI)
Lexicon MC-8 connected via 5.1 passthrough
Sunfire Cinema Grand amplifier
Monitor Audio floor-standing fronts and MA FX-2 rears
Boston Accoustics VR-MC center
SVS SB12-Plus sub
