Hot Seat Review

Anything with a skyscraper and a star on the cover is, inevitably, compared to Die Hard. That would be rather nasty to Hot Seat, where the main premise is banks instead of bonds. Mel Gibson makes little use of himself once more as he begins careering through the latter stages of his career with little quality to his work. Just a few years ago his double pairing of Dragged Across Concrete and The Professor and the Madman was a fine double bill. Now, he slums it with seven budget action features and one surprisingly strong Christmas feature to his name. Recovery from this section of career work is difficult, almost impossible, when the direction James Cullen Bressack offers up is nothing shy of dull. 

Hallmark action movies are growing and growing now that Nicolas Cage made it cool to feature in. Bruce Willis cashed out in sincere and respectable terms. They are both exceptions to the rule, that rule being if the career is on a downward spiral, then cashing in that name value is all a thespian has left. The rest are surviving and pushing on through, the Gibson and Kevin Dillon-led feature is not as horrendous as it could have been. Once in a blue moon, one of these action features manages to inspire some competency because of who is drawn in. If it were not for the horrid special effects and the standard narrative lenience, then Hot Seat would have drawn itself to a similar quality as White Elephant or Agent Game. 

Instead, this firefighter-turned-bomb squad feature and the subsequent need for cash in the titular hot seats turn what would have been a relatively engaged plot into a convoluted mess that relies on awful pacing and limited style. Dillon is the hacker man, an equivalent of Mr. Robot who keeps yelling out about DDOS and networks as the camera flashes through stock server footage rooms. Redirect the signals, Dillon, the audience is redirecting their attention elsewhere as you do. Hot Seat is a complete fumbling not just for squandering the fine work it does in building toward these moments of climax, but because of how little it understands about the real world. Action comes thick and fast but none of it means anything when Bressack and his cast have no idea how technology works beyond the buzzwords they try and implement here. 

Eventually, Gibson finds himself draped up as an American hero once more, an attempt to make himself look the part as his colleagues unmask a Scooby-Doo caricature draped in a latex Richard Nixon mask. Hot Seat is certainly out there enough to laugh at. Special effects awkwardness, supporting performances that have no grasp of what is going on or how it is meant to pan out. As it all starts to unravel into this awkward mystery-like action feature, the camera starts swinging, spinning and never quite figuring out where it should look. Hot Seat swings through so many emotive concepts and blasé understandings of the press, of bomb squads, of family matters. A terrorist incident reunites the family, according to Hot Seat, a feature that is as cold and lifeless as it gets for the hallmark action movie.