The crime genre bleeds blue. Crimes tend to be bad, and that makes it easy to establish the police, by the nature of their work, as the good guys who work against crime and become easy heroes for films reaching for heroism. This is especially true for the terrorist hostage-taker sub-genre, as seen in films such as The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Die Hard, The Rock, or the “true story” of Captain Phillips. The best of them stir just enough emotion in the hostage-taker(s) to remind the audience that they are indeed human, even if still predictably condemning them, while remaining psychologically interesting. It’s the same spirited contradiction that explains the cultural obsession with figures like Luigi Mangione. The worst of the sub-genre, then, projects the darkest stereotypes about the “kind” of people who commit crimes. These are films like Taken, with heinous gangs running sex-slave circles in virtual isolation from all socio-economic commentary. Regardless of which side of the empathy debate these films fall on, they share an affinity for various flavors of law enforcement propaganda. iHostage, a Dutch Netflix original based on incidents at an Amsterdam Apple store where a Bulgarian citizen was held hostage by a 27-year-old man who demanded a Crypto ransom, might just be the copagandiest of them all.
Dutch director and genre buzzard Bobby Boermans wastes no time getting to the aforementioned Apple store in Leidseplein, and even less time moving to the store’s infamous incident. The attacker, Ammar, also known as Double A (Soufiane Moussouli), walks into the outlet with a hood on, pulls out a gun, and issues commands with the clear threat of violence. The chaos allows many to escape the building or to make their way upstairs, unknown to Ammar. Three customers and an employee hide in the closet located across from the elevator on the entry-level floor. Only a lone Bulgarian national, Ilian Petrov (Admir Šehović), has the unfortunate luck of being a hostage. Ammar’s demands are silly — cryptocurrency and safe passage — and his planning is even worse than his demands. This man never had a chance to pull off his crime, and it’s not clear whether he put much thought into his contingency plans either. Šehović gives a surprisingly stoic performance that both seems situationally improbable and cedes much of the easily earned emotional high ground of being a hostage. The only palpable tension comes in Ilian’s decisive action to escape, an escape caught on camera that became viral in the Netherlands, but the adaptation of the getaway presented in iHostage tediously imagines nothing more than a new angle for the viral footage.
Boermans, who directed seven episodes of The Golden Hour, constructs another terrorist-centered venture in iHostage, although the series is fictional rather than an adaptation of real events. But the more interesting name attached to both of these properties is Simon de Waal, an Amsterdam homicide detective and writer. De Waal wrote both The Golden Hour and iHostage, and both root their premises in right-wing anxieties of immigration and the spread of Islam in Europe. It seems to be the only genre the author writes in, too. According to his Festival Scope Pro page, he has penned “150 episodes for all major police series on [Dutch] TV.” The Golden Hour is a mystery with an Afghan immigrant cop at the center who is investigating a(n Afghan) childhood friend as the possible assailant. To no surprise, the terrorist in iHostage also comes from a Muslim background. A Dutch cop writing about young Muslim men disrupting the peace in Amsterdam is, to be generous, defensive of a state security apparatus that villanizes Muslim men, and immigrants more broadly.
The cops take up about half of iHostage’s screen time, yet fail to ever penetrate the psychology of the attacker. They are given spouses and children; of course, Ammar has no family life presented, presumably because the filmmakers couldn’t imagine that such a thing might be of interest to viewers. Empathy would make the hostage-taker too dangerous, too like us. For as little as the cops do, they never misstep, and they are never quick to pull the trigger. And the real-life incident’s controversial and violent conclusion, wherein the police hit (and eventually kill) Ammar with a vehicle — an instinctual and decisive action from one special agent — is here reduced from controversy and instead valorized. An existing recording, shot from a further vantage point, better emphasizes the distance between the car and Ammar in a way that the film’s much car interior and more personal perspective does not. The closer perspective also minimizes the violence of the impact while simultaneously positioning the viewer on one side of the collision. This essential difference eliminates the in-film possibility of any alternative action(s) and eliminates controversy.
The script takes a few precautions to avoid “cancellation,” although not as many as The Golden Hour safeguards, by casting the lead cop as Afghan or maintaining some ambiguity regarding the aggressor. The largest concession in iHostage is the two lighter-skinned Arab women hiding in the employee closet. Their femininity seemingly excuses them from the violence that right-wing thinking traps Islamic cultures in — it’s almost a wonder that the shortcut-abundant script doesn’t have the two women pray with piety in the closet. Despite such concerted efforts — be they well-intentioned or merely deflection — these concessions to pluralistic imaginings of Amsterdam do not distract from the fundamental Islamophobic anxiety that drives The Golden Hour, iHostage, and the deluge of other copaganda gracing screens big and small in our present age.
DIRECTOR: Bobby Boermans; CAST: Soufiane Moussouli, Marcel Hensema, Loes Haverkort, Louis Talpe; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: April 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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