The Negotiator
blogStill ill and off work, bunged up and doing my best to flush out whatever virus I caught. I keep telling myself that I am building up my resistance, as Nietzsche said: Even strong occasionally get fatigued. I may have got that quote wrong. I am paraphrasing it from one of my favourite comfort movies, The Negotiator, where it is spoken by Paul Giametti to the protagonist, Danny Roman (Samuel L. Jackson).
I don’t know why The Negotiator isn’t better known. It is fantastic, up there with Die Hard as a high-concept action film. Jackson looks bizarre in it, like a ginger frog, but is perfect for the role of hostage negotiator framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Combined with Kevin Spacey’s career-defining performance as Chris Sabian (the characters have great names: Frost, Argento, Palermo … and Sabian, which is like a cross between the words ‘save’ and ‘symbian’).
Like Shooter (the other film that I saw today in order to lift my spirits), The Negotiator is a film about one man rising up against all odds to defeat an amoral enemy. I wonder if it unconsciously encourages my white blood cells to do their jobs better? Possibly not. Maybe I should watch a good war film, where the enemy are defeated by team effort rather than elevating the lone hero. I doubt that white blood cells are ever lone heroes.