Nasty Little Thing Productions

Movies: The Hire: Hostage

Abhishek Shanbhag told me quite sometime back about BMWFilms, where a set of short films (made to promote BMW's Z4 Roadster) by acclaimed filmmakers like John Woo, Tony Scott, etc. were available.  Apparently, the idea of promoting the car through these short action films originated from David Fincher.

A couple of days back, I was checking John Woo's filmography on the IMDb and was surprised to see an entry on it called The Hire: Hostage.  When I looked at the details page for that film, I realised that it was one of the BMW films.  A 66 MB download, I got the file yesterday after a couple of failed attempts, and watched it a few times.

All the short films in the The Hire series star Clive Owen as the Driver of the BMW.  The John Woo short is about 9 minutes long, and has the Driver racing against time to rescue high-profile CEO Linda Delacroix (Kathryn Morris) who has been abducted by former employee Harry Baumgartner (Maury Chaykin), and is now in the trunk of a sinking car.

Hostage is a stylish movie that's compactly told, though I guess it would have been better had Woo got more time to show off his usual movie trickery.  It's granted, though, that the point of the movie is to show off the car, and that it does very well.

I'm eager to see more of these, especially Tony Scott's Beat the Devil.

EDIT (3:18 PM): I am downloading Beat the Devil now, and plan to download Joe Carnahan's short Ticker after that.  I want to get all eight films in the series, and put them together on one CD.

EDIT (5:27 PM): Yes!  Beat the Devil finished downloading.  Started downloading Ticker.

posted by Karthik Abhiram @ 11:32 PM