His career seemed to be back on track with The Sixth Sense, but Bruce Willis has struggled to find a hit since then.  Hostage may have provided it and, indeed, it received some good reviews, but it's box office that really matters, and to that end Willis's next project will reportedly (some may add the word "desperately") be Die Hard 4.  Hostage was a slightly convoluted but engaging thriller about a former hostage negotiator who moves away from the big city to get away from it all but then, somewhat inevitably (has he never watched any movies?) seeing his own family kidnapped.

Alexandre Desplat has emerged in recent times as an original and exciting voice in modern film music; but so far, he has stuck resolutely to art house fare.  Hostage is his first really mainstream movie and, to that end, it's quite surprising that he would do it - it was difficult to imagine how his elegant, distinctly classical voice might work with a film like this.  But work it does.  The score opens with the beautiful "Child's Spirit", featuring wordless vocals from Antonia Desplat (any relation?) - it's a soft and engaging theme for the film, completely going against what may have been expected, but it works very well.  The vocals reappear several times through the score, always having an impact.

Also having an impact is the action music, something of which we certainly haven't heard much from this composer before.  There's some dynamite material present.  It opens with some vaguely John Barry / James Bond style material in "Hostage" and "Canyon Inn", with lyrical portrayals of the action and horror; it's exciting and dynamic without being overly histrionic.  But later, Desplat introduces some truly pulse-pounding material, especially "Crawl Space", a thrilling and explosive piece of action music.  Of course, in a film like this, there's a lot of suspense.  Suspense music can frequently be really very boring, but Desplat keeps things moving along at a good pace.  A fine example (and again I'd say it's superficially similar to what John Barry's approach might be) is "Drive", which is propelled along by percussion and in which not a great deal happens, but it somehow never loses the listener's interest.  The other approach to suspense music - of having soft strings occasionally punctuated by violent stings from brass and percussion - can also be found in the score ("Breaking In", for instance, though that does develop into some great action music as it progresses).

This music is distinctly modern, in several ways.  Desplat has a very personal style of writing for an orchestra which is welcome and very refreshing, and that style is of course in evidence throughout; but he occasionally embellishes the orchestra with an electric cello or electric guitar, which works very well to give an extra something to the feel of the movie.  The score is clearly not as "arty" as those for which he has become famous, but having said that, there can't have been many scores for action thrillers in recent years featuring extensive and detailed solo passages for recorder.  Films like Hostage do not frequently receive interesting scores these days; it seems that many composers, realising their music will always be playing second fiddle to the sound effects, just go through the motions, and it shows.  But when the director is receptive, and the composer is willing, there can still be some fine results; and Hostage is a fine score.