'The Hostage Diaries' tells the story of journalist Sean Langan, who was kidnapped by the Taliban fighters he'd gone to Pakistan to interview. The film isn't badly done: indeed, Douglas Henshall is quite convincing in the lead role, and its portrayal of the mechanics of the situation is solid, but it lacks both piercing insight and dramatic narrative, and isn't quite personal enough to work as a wholly character-driven study either.
I got a message recently, completely out of the blue from a director called Norman Hull; I shan't repeat the rather short message here, but it was odd and as a result of it I clicked on his IMDb resume to see what films he had done and which of them I had perhaps commented on. The Kidnap Diaries was top of that list and by coincidence this film had been sitting on my v-box since it screened on BBC4 last year – for some reason I just never got around to seeing it and I figured Hull getting in touch was as good a motivation as any.
