User reviews

Here's another example of hiring big-name actors to entice the viewer to see a really bad film. And was it ever bad.

I get that it's newb writer Mickey Solis' first full length film screenplay, but there's no excuse to take a simple generic genre, and chop it up into incoherent nonsense where the action was laughable, and the dialogue cringe-worthy. "What's that? A bomb (over the door)". *still opens door* "be careful". Uggggh. The story lacked continuity and basic logic. The normally comfortable 93 minute runtime felt like 2+ hours with the slow pacing and dragged out filler scenes for the little amount of substance the (convoluted) story had.

What's even worse, is that you have producer and seasoned director Jon Keeyes quarterback this entire nonsense. I've seen first time amateur directors produce a film 100x better. He horribly directed the scenes, camera work, and failed miserably in directing his cast. The cinematography was bad, and the score on the worst side of the b-film grade spectrum. The sound felt distant, as if someone forgot the boom mics.

I want to say that perhaps if some of the high-paid actor budget was used to have a seasoned filmmaker go over the amateur screenplay for edits to improve it, but a seasoned director (Keeyes) could/should have fixed this mess. I feel bad for Gibson and Malkovich having this flop on their resume. It's a very generous 4/10 from me, all going to the star leads who did their best with what they had to work with.

When I sat down to watch the 2021 action thriller "Rogue Hostage", it was because the movie have John Malkovich on the cast list. Yeah, I hadn't even heard about the movie prior to getting to sit down to watch it.

I am by no account a fan of Tyrese Gibson's acting skills, so having him in the lead role here was not the main attraction for me. When I saw that the movie also had Michael Jai White on the cast list, I must admit that I found it to be looking brighter for the movie.

But let me just say right away that "Rogue Hostage" was a tedious affair of a movie. It was bland and generic, offering absolutely nothing new to the action thriller genre. And everything that took place in the storyline is something that have been done and seen before in other movies, and more often than not, also done better than it was here.

The storyline was just plainly generic and predictable. So this is essentially a movie where you just lean back, disconnect your brain and watch the screen. And trust me, once the movie comes to an end, you will forget about the entire ordeal.

"Rogue Hostage" was a swing and a miss from writer Mickey Solis and director Jon Keeyes.

I am rating "Rogue Hostage" a generous three out of ten stars.

1 out of 5 stars.

Horrible and dumb. Dumb plot. Action is horrible. Acting is tedious. Script is filled with dumb characters and just flat out terrible.

This movie may quite literally be the worst movie I've ever sat down and willingly watched. It's sad to see John Malkovich in this. The plot is the same basic action movie plot with many unreasonable things happening and, on top of that, painfully cringe-worthy acting. If there was a way to rate this under 1 star, I would swiftly take that opportunity.

It starts off so bad I figured it had to get better.

It didn't it got worse I can't believe I didn't turn it off.

The story is bad the acting is bad the characters are not likeable, what more can I say.

I compare movies like this to one of the worse movies I ever watched, but this is worse than Bunnyman.

This movie sets a new level of bad for me to compare to.

There are so many things bad about this movie I don't want to waste more of my time even talking about it.

A lot of movies have this flavor and it's getting pretty annoying. Nothing new, every move predictable and this movie does an extra job of making everything bad; poor dialogues, bad actors and actresses with bad acting, bad choreographies... an amateur way of doing things and becomes very hard to watch. Like I said just get drunk and watch.... It looks like a school project.

How in the world did John Malkovich get mixed up in this mess? Terrible script, plot points missing, awful acting..there's just so much bad here. The attempt at suspense is laughable. The characters are paper thin. I was actually rooting for some of them to die. Zombies would have actually helped.

I wonder why they added an action star like Michael J. White to the cast, only to give him zero action scenes.

Tyrese Gibson does the action, but he does it so poorly you almost start to root for the bad guys.

The story is going nowhere. The action is stale. The characters seems to be added in there at random.

The hero has PTSD and helps kids for a living. We're supposed to like him. But we don't really care for any of the characters in this lackluster.

I just don't get what was the whole point, it just sucks so hard that I can't believe this has been done intentionally - surely something went horribly wrong somewhere, there has to be some excuse for the lack of any intelligence.

No words can describe what a piece of poo this is. The unbelievable content aside, the production/post production quality is beyond horrendous. Story - abominable. Acting - laughable. Concept - WHAT THE F....???

Tyrese Gibson was great in bby boy, 4 Brothers, waist deep, Legion, The Take, and all the F&F movies. This was not one of his better movies. The acting felt forced and sometimes very fake. No real emotional connection between any of the other actors. Which was sad because a few of them were well known. I swear I could have done a better job just winging it. I will not recommend this one to anyone and I myself will never see it again. Not even if I had extra time one my hands. 4 is me being extremely generous!

Good acting, well written, worth hour and half of some tv time . Tyrese Gibson still acts with care in his work! Makes the movie that much better! Even the side roles as many as they had for such a short movie they all had good interactions on screen.

I would never call this a great movie - by a long shot. I am however a bit surprised that it is only rated around a 3 at the moment. I have seen a lot worse - literally. But movies and the viewing experience is always in the eye of the beholder. So maybe I gave it an extra point to balance things out - or maybe I just did it, because most of the time I am too nice when it comes to rating films.

Having said that, the talent in front of the camera is quite good to say the least. John Malkovich always delivers, no matter how big or small his roles are. The action is decent (do not expect anything special though). Having said all that, the movie is quite predictable and there are no big surprises.

Kyle Snowden (Fast & Furious' Tyrese Gibson) is struggling with many life challenges. As war veteran, suffering from PTSD, who is also a single parent, he is now sucked into a family / hostage situation. Can he save the day? But don't kid yourself, this is not a 'die hard' rehash. Not even close.

Obviously this is a B-grade movie. CGI and special effects on this one are laughable, at this level they should have changed the story so that they don't need to overlay explosions and fires in such a bad way. The acting is also B-grade level (including J Malkovich that seem to be doing somebody a favor and acting even worse than his usual self) but the real cardinal sin here is that the movie is boring and the script is over-chewed not to say idiotic at times.

There is really no saving grace for this movie. There are some small sparks like a couple of scenes with the kid, Manny, but those get overrun by total disgracing of the marines, PTSD patients, the social workers, politicians, police and what have you. It falls in a great shame to "Run, Hide, Fight (2020)" which also don't have any big stars in it, but at least is portraying a possible story and relatable characters in a similar environment. If you have a chance, watch that one instead, it is much less of a time waster.

I would not fault anybody with rating this 1 star, but for an honest review I would rate this 34 / 100, it's watchable but not much more than that.

Don't waste your time. It is so bad, and gets worse.

Never seen a movie absolutely waste money or acting talent like this one did. Would've had more imagination if it was written and directed by a bunch of 10 year olds. Absolute trash.

Terrible acting, lame actuon, I can't believe I watched the whole thing. Avoid unless you are extremely bored or want to fall asleep.

The movie was poorly developed and directed. Had some good actors but they didn't bring their A game.

Watch it only if you have an assignment on how to make some well known actors go wrong in a Sloth action movie and watch everything in it deteriorate from the word go till the end.

This was one odd movie that centered about a bunch of people running around inside of supermarket. That is it. When it ended I had to check my remote to make sure it didn't randomly fast forward things - it did not. John Malkovich was great (duh), but outside of that I've no idea what I just watched.

Great movie and action all around. Love the acting and visuals.

This movie. This movie. I'm not sure why the other ratings are so low but it wasn't bad. Writers did a great job of lining up the characters and introducing them so you would know what was going on and who it was impacting. Actors followed through on it from what I could tell. Some corny jokes from Tyrese and a few other folks but overall a good movie to give a chance!

Save your time, horrible acting, story, characters... Ugh.. Save your time and watch anything else in the world than this movie. It's just truly atrocious.

This movie contains no effort: not from the writers, directors, actors, special effects team or set and costume crew etc. It sucks...it sucks so bad it's shocking. John Malkovich must be desperate for a buck or just old and senile. There are bad movies that you can at least watch start to end and criticize, have a laugh at how bad they are but in this case it's so bad it's not even sarcastically funny. Bleah!