99 min | R | July 1, 2022 | Lionsgate
A bomb sits under a hacker’s chair. He has to break into bank accounts and dodge a bullheaded ex-cop while a voice in his ear counts down. The chair is the only thing in this movie holding tension.
Orlando Friar runs IT security and arrives at work to find his office chair wired to explode. A faceless voice on the phone orders him to commit a string of cyber heists or die. Outside, a bomb technician closes in while the clock runs. James Cullen Bressack builds the film on a single immobilizing gimmick and asks one man to carry the suspense from a seated position. The result is a thriller that mistakes a stationary premise for a tense one.
Kevin Dillon plays Orlando with sweaty desperation and not much range beneath it. He delivers the panic in one register and stays there for the duration. Mel Gibson plays bomb squad veteran Wallace Reed and spends most of his scenes standing in parking lots talking into a radio. He is sidelined from the action and his weariness reads as genuine rather than performed. Shannen Doherty plays Chief Pam Connelly as a procedural obstacle who exists to relay information, and Sam Asghari plays Sergeant Tobias with the stiffness of an actor handed exposition instead of a character.
Bressack directs from a script by Collin Watts and Leon Langford that confines the threat to one room and then refuses to make that confinement work for it. The camera circles Orlando in restless handheld moves that try to manufacture urgency the staging does not earn. The split-screen inserts of computer screens and surveillance feeds pad the running time and bleed whatever claustrophobia the chair establishes. The score hammers every beat with synth stingers that announce danger the images cannot deliver. The editing cuts away from Orlando so often that the bomb stops feeling like a present threat.
Hot Seat takes a premise that worked in better hostage thrillers and strips out the craft that made them tick. The single-location hook demands precision and escalation, and the film provides neither. Gibson’s name sits at the top of the marketing while his character watches from the periphery, which tells you where the priorities are. This is a movie assembled to fill a slot rather than to grip an audience. It sits down and never gets up.