Bruce Willis gets all gung-ho again as an LAPD hostage negotiator who has opted for the quiet life after a botched operation led to the deaths of a mother and son.

When we first meet Bruce he's languidly lying on his back, combing his beard and coolly talking down a crazed hostage taker. Minutes later the captives are shot dead.

Fast-forward a few years and Bruce - his confidence shattered - has taken on the job of chief of police in Californian backwater Bristo Camino.

However, the crime rate in the dozy town is about to go through the roof when three delinquents clumsily stage a botched robbery at a rich accountant's house.

Bruce has an unwelcome sense of deja vu as the trio - their narked leader, his puppyish brother and a lank-haired psycho-loon - take the number-cruncher and his two children hostage.

Handing the case over to a hostage-negotiating team, he unhappily finds himself thrust back into the limelight when it turns out the accountant is not what he appears.

He's the money-launderer for a gang of desperate crimmos... who take Bruce's estranged wife and daughter hostage to ensure their dodgy investments are kept safe.

OK, it has the makings of a complicated, not to say convoluted, plotline but director Florent Siri efficiently builds up the tension with a deft touch reeling in all the narrative threads.

Adding to the suspense is the decision to stage all the action inside a designer house, which is not so much a home as villain's lair in a Bond movie.

So there's fun to be had with two-way mirrors, a security system that makes Fort Knox look like a wedding marquee and labyrinthine maze of ventilation shafts.

There's a little too much easy sentiment - Bruce tearfully talking video games with a child hostage - and occasionally his negotiating spiel spills over into Mickey Mouse psychology.

Bruce (no stranger to hostage situations after the Die Hard series) does what's expected while Ben Foster makes for a suitably crazed captor.

For tense, edgy entertainment, it makes perfect bedfellows with The Negotiator and Ransom. Which is really all that you need to know.

Tim Evans