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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 2.35:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • French: Dolby Digital Surround
  • Italian: Dolby Digital Surround
  Subtitles
    English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Portuguese, English - Hearing Impaired, Italian - Hearing Impaired
  Extras
  • 1 Theatrical trailer
  • Featurette - On Location Behind-The-Scenes Documentary
  • Production notes

The Negotiator

Warner Bros./Warner Bros. . R4 . COLOR . 134 mins . MA15+ . PAL

  Feature
Contract

What a great movie. It's not very often of late the hollywood produces a gem of a movie but the Negotiator sparkles on dvd.

Danny Roman (Samuel Jackson) is a hostage negotiator for the Chicago Police Department, and a damn good one. But when he finds his partner Nate dead, he is accused of his murder and soon finds himself framed for stealing departmental funds and storing them into off-shore accounts.

In a last ditch attempt to clear his name he walks into the offices of Internal Affairs and takes 4 hostages himself. One of those hostages is thought to be part of the frame-job yet Danny is still not convinced that he has cleared his name. Knowing that he can't trust his who precint he negotiates for a neutral negotiator named Chris Sabian, who as no prior affilliation with anyone in this department.

From here we see the pieces of this puzzle shuffle a little more until the final conclusion where all is revealed. Who lives? Who dies? Who's good? Who's bad?

  Video
Contract

Top shelf stuff here. Warner Brothers are known to produce good, not great, transfers onto dvd but the detail on this transfer is so good that it's hard to find any fault at all.

Most of the film is shot at night and the black levels and shadow detail are spot on. For those scenes during the day, we get to see a transfer that is full of vibrant color and even flesh tones.

The funeral scene impressed me with the greens and the navy blues of all the officers uniforms. Everything looked so sharp and clear. Some scenes toward the end of the movie showing mayhem in the streets revealed so much detail in the film that it felt like I was truly watching hi-resolution film.

  Audio
Contract

The audio on this disc is provided within a great soundtrack that utilises an encompassing sound stage during every scene.

At the outset where we see Danny negotiating his latest hostage crisis, we are brought up to speed with the arsenal of backup moving into position. Alot of subtle and directional effects used here. The customary helicopter fly-by sound is also there so fly-by fans won't miss out. :)

The dialogue is alot clearer than some other titles I've viewed of late. The surround channels produce alot of ambience and there's a nice spread of sounds across the entire range of frequencies.

The subtleties are the main attraction of the soundtrack. In the scene where Danny is home with his wife we get a nice subtle ambience from a cd player in the background. Little things like this impress me when it comes to audio.

  Extras
Contract

We get a 16 minute behind the scenes styled making of feature with director F. Gary Gray doing most of the talking. It's a full frame doco with 2 channel sound but the video quality is great.

We also get an anamorphically enhanced theatrical trailer in 2 channel sound. On the back of the disc cover we see a screen shot of the main menu which shows a "Reel Recommendations" link but that doesn't seem to appear, even when I did set my player to region 2.

  Overall  
Contract

I really enjoyed this movie. It was up there with the best of other cop suspense genres. It's no die hard, it's not meant to be. It's a little predicatable but the rest of it is very engrossing indeed.

I now wished I had seen this movie in the cinemas but I thoroughly enjoyed this dvd. Highly recommended.


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