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*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
If you're a movie fan you've seen a lot of thrillers. Have you ever wondered how the people cope emotionally afterwards? This movie tries to answer that question. Julie Benz, single mother of a little girl, is a bank manager who is targeted by bank robbers. They break into her home, hold her girl hostage, tape dynamite to her, and send her to grab the bank's money. And after they leave, that's where the movie starts.There are two major problems with this movie that stop it from being more than potentially excellent. The first problem is that the first twenty minutes run out exactly like half a dozen big screen thrillers, but without much in the way of more than adequate camera work. There is nothing to draw you terribly into the movie in the first twenty minutes with its seen-it-all-before techniques. By the time this sequence is finished, I was ready to not like the rest of the movie, and it never gave me much of an incentive to change my mind.The second is that there is no real sense of who Ms. Benz's character, Michelle Estey, actually is. She is never more than a sketch. After spending more than an hour with her -- months from her character's viewpoint -- one should know more.One minor flaw makes this movie even worse: the music score. It is obtrusive, obvious in its direction and annoying.Although HELD HOSTAGE makes an attempt to examine the aftermath of a terrifying situation, its ham-handed handling makes it a poor movie.
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