THE HOST
Dir: Andy Newbery (15 103 mins)
A leaden thriller that never cranks up, not helped by a cliché ridden, clumsy script, The Host fails to entertain.
A would be Hitchcockian set up sees frustrated banker Robert Atkinson, played by Mike Beckingham, caught in an evolving labyrinth of criminal activity that is using him as a hapless pawn.
Atkinson steals money from his bank to gamble away in a bid to recover some sort of status and get himself out of a rut after an affair with his boss’s wife threatens to come to an end and his life appears to be going nowhere. A somewhat rash and credibility straining decision, he soon loses all the money he stole at the card table. Luckily an Asian businessman, Lau, played by Togo Igawa, comes to his aid offering to pay his debts if he will deliver a briefcase to Amsterdam and bring one back for him.
Before he knows it, he finds himself working for the Triads, possibly double dealing for the DEA, via a silkily voiced agent played by Nigel Barber and is put up in a luxurious Amsterdam house. Here, matters get a little darker as his supposed host Vera, played by Maryam Houssani, part of a wealthy and powerful Dutch family, turns femme fatale and torturer. She has some Daddy issues and matters turn a little hostile.
Focus switches hazily and unsatisfyingly between characters as Beckingham’s brother (Dougie Poynter) investigates his sibling’s disappearance accompanied by Suan Li-Ong’s undercover agent who, in turn, is out to avenge her father’s death at the hands of drug lord, Lau.
The drug dealers and the DEA wonder what has happened to their mule/informant as further narrative hoops are jumped through. Bereft of tension, lacking pace and with some rather stilted writing and acting,
The Host never convinces, often bordering on parody as it nods to Psycho, failing to create characters to care about, repeating action and story to little gain.
**
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Words: Kieron Self
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