Watch FBI: Negotiator For Free

Awesome Movie

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Laura Martin (Elisabeth Röhm) is a single mom and an FBI negotiator replacing the sexist angry veteran Agent Carlo. She's secretly dating her superior Frank Gerrard. Her daughter Taylor is best friends with sickly Annie Moss (Britt McKillip) and her mother Elizabeth (Chandra West). Annie is desperate for a transplant. Laura is sidelined after a difficult negotiation and then Elizabeth takes hostages at the hospital to get her daughter into an experimental trial.This is a TV movie. It is awkwardly clunky at times. It can't exceed its TV essence. The leads are fine actors. It pushes the melodrama too hard. It struggles to be something more. None of it is anything exception.

We begin "4 Days Earlier" with the robbery of a convenience store. It becomes a dangerous hostage situation. The swaying, shaky camera-work is dizzying and makes it difficult to watch. But this effect is used mainly for the hostage situations. The significance of "4 Days" is unclear, and action likely changes to the present somewhere early in the running time. Our heroine is pretty blonde FBI agent Elizabeth Rohm (as Laura Martin). She specializes in hostage situations; when a mishap incurs a lawsuit, she is given an unplanned vacation. Divorced a year, Ms. Rohm dates her FBI agent partner, athletically-built Woody Jeffreys (as Frank Gerrard)...Rohm's teen daughter Taylor-Anne Reid (as Taylor) misses her dad and resents Mr. Jeffreys horning in on the family. They are friendly with pretty blonde housewife Chandra West (as Elizabeth "Beth" Moss) and her teen daughter Britt McKillip (as Annie Moss). Unfortunately, Ms. West's daughter is deathly ill. When mother West learns her daughter's experimental medication will be discontinued, she becomes desperate. It climaxes with a hostage situation at "Burnaby Hospital". The mother/daughter scenes are nice, Jerry Wasserman (as Jon Di Carlo) and the supporting cast add some spark, but "FBI: Negotiator" never takes you hostage.*** FBI: Negotiator (10/24/05) Nicholas Kendall ~ Elizabeth Rohm, Chandra West, Woody Jeffreys, Taylor-Anne Reid

Okay, I watch Lifetime, I admit it. About four out of every ten movies are pretty decent and once in awhile there is a really good one. It passes the time when I need something relaxing. This movie actually made me gag, it is that bad, from beginning to end. The characters started out being pretty interesting but every scene got worse, I don't know how the actors got through it, they must have been thinking after each absurd scene that their careers would be ruined forever just from being associated with this movie! Not one plot line or scene felt real or at all believable, and it wasn't because of bad acting. Who in the world wrote the script and how could it have been approved? The last 15 minutes of the film really made me angry, I sat there with my mouth open saying "really?". Sorry for the rant, but I just had to warn people not to waste two hours on this.

These comments could contain spoilers (see last paragraph), but the movie's script is so formulaic that there is really nothing in the plot to spoil.I first encountered this film's lead, Elisabeth Röhm, in the TV series, "Bull," and was so taken with her beauty that I missed if there were any defects in her acting (after all, to me, she was a "newcomer"). By the time she starred in "Law and Order," however, they started becoming evident; and I have to say that they haven't improved here...nothing really bad, just too much false emotion, i.e., there are times you can catch her "acting." The best performances here (IMO, and within the confines of the script), are by Chandra West as the mother of the ailing friend of FBI mom's daughter (played well by Taylor Anne Reid), and by Malcolm Stewart as the FBI boss (especially in the scene where he explains to Reid's character why she shouldn't be blaming her mom for her father's leaving).If there's a spoiler here, it's this: the movie's title promises a hostage negotiation thriller (which in a way it is), but the point of the drama is to highlight the potential fate of severely ill patients excluded from clinical trials, with the FBI mother and neglected daughter merely a predictable structure to fill out the time, and ultimately deliver the message. Otherwise, there is much better drama on series television, and every single point of this drama is tied up neatly in the end, leading to a pat conclusion.