iHostage — Bobby Boermans [Review]

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.