There is a lean, mean thriller buried inside Hot Seat, and it is the one James Cullen Bressack never quite detonates. The setup is almost foolproof: a man wakes up wired to a bomb and ordered to rob banks by keyboard before a hidden voice blows him apart. It is a premise built entirely out of tension, and the film keeps finding ways to let the air out of it.

Kevin Dillon plays Orlando Friar, a reformed black-hat hacker turned office IT drone who sits down at his desk to find a pressure-plate bomb taped under his chair and an anonymous extortionist in his earpiece. Across town, Mel Gibson is Wallace Reed, the weary bomb-squad veteran called in to keep Friar alive while he is marched through a chain of remote cyber-heists. The clock is loud, the stakes are literal, and for a while that is almost enough.

A premise the direction keeps deflating

Bressack is a prolific maker of exactly this kind of contained genre picture, and he covers the desk-bound standoff with enough angles to keep it moving. What he cannot do is disguise the budget. The marquee explosions arrive as conspicuously weightless CGI, the hacking is the usual cascade of nonsense interfaces and grinning skull graphics, and every time the screws should tighten a slack line reading or a flat cutaway loosens them again. A single-location thriller lives or dies on pressure; this one keeps cracking a window.

The script and direction do spring a few mild surprises and minor twists to spice things up. That doesn’t quite make up for the tackiness elsewhere.
Leslie Felperin, The Guardian

The Cast

Dillon does the heavy lifting and is the best reason to stay: sweaty, panicked and credibly out of his depth, he turns a man glued to a chair into the film’s one real source of momentum. Gibson, billed second and working mostly by phone and from behind a cordon, lends his weathered authority to a part that asks almost nothing of him — the kind of supporting turn critics have fairly called a sleepwalk. Around them, Shannen Doherty’s police chief and Sam Asghari’s sergeant fill out a precinct drawn in broad strokes, while Friar’s family is wheeled in to supply jeopardy the plot cannot generate on its own.

Mel Gibson at the premiere of “We Were Soldiers,” Mann’s Village Theater, Westwood. Depositphotos

Gibson all but sleepwalks through an underwritten role that smacks of take-the-money-and-run tedium, in a film short on plot development or surprises.
Terry Staunton, Radio Times

Assembled from better thrillers

Almost everything here has been borrowed and barely re-tagged. The bomb that cannot be left behind is Speed; the captive forced to perform for a disembodied tormentor is Phone Booth; the gun-to-the-head super-hacking is Swordfish with the gloss sanded off. There is no shame in working inside a tradition, but Hot Seat rarely adds a wrinkle of its own. It reaches for the cat-and-mouse cyber-thriller handbook and copies the answers, right down to the obligatory late twist about who is really on the other end of the line.

The verdict

It is not the disaster its opening effects threaten. Dillon’s commitment, a brisk runtime and a hook that refuses to fully die keep it watchable on a quiet night, and a sharper, meaner version of this same script is genuinely easy to imagine. As it stands, Hot Seat is a thriller that talks itself out of its own urgency — all ticking clock, no detonation.