Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) is a cool-under-fire hostage negotiator, directing a situation where things are tense but seem to be under control. In the opening scenes he decides that "No one will die today," so he orders a sniper to take a pass on a shot that would kill the hostage taker. Things don’t go as planned and not long after that Talley is the police chief in a small upscale town in the LA hills rather than being with the big boys in the city of angels.

Mr. Smith (Kevin Pollak) is a very successful accountant, whose job it is to launder money for some powerful underworld bosses. He gets the money out of the country and into safe banks, for which he is well paid. His home is a high-tech marvel and a fortress for him and his son and daughter. Eyeball security, reminiscent of "The Panic Room" with Jodie Foster, allows for surveillance inside and outside the stone and glass structure. Great¾ if you pay attention to the monitors. Smith thinks his biggest problems are to get his teenage daughter Jennifer (Michelle Horn) to dress so she is not so sexually provocative, and to keep up with the video games of his younger son Tommy (Jimmy Bennett). This all changes when Dennis (Jonathan Tucker of "Stateside"), his younger brother Kevin (Marshall Allman), and Mars (Ben Foster), a guy they’ve known only a few weeks, break into Smith’s home. The intruders are clearly visible on the security screens, but young Tommy presses a silent alarm after he sees them inside. Dennis is the brash leader of the group, whose bark is worse than his bite, but when an officer is dispatched to the house Mars, a psychopath of major proportions, kills her at the front gate as she talks to Mr. Smith on the microphone. With this point of no return, Jeff Talley is now back into hostage control mode.

Talley is more than ready to give up control to the LAPD and FBI, until the mob that Smith works for kidnaps his family as the trump card. They want a CD-ROM hidden in the house that has key financial information on it. Talley gets back into the mix to save his wife and daughter. Young Tommy is resourceful, as he navigates from room to room through the large air conditioning ducts. He steals his sister’s cell phone and is in constant communication with Talley.

The film started out great but began to implode shortly after the officer was shot at Smith’s home. She was shot in the afternoon and in the next scene an ambulance arrives and it’s pitch black. That’s just sloppy editing.

There is a certain sadistic tone to the film that really goes off the deep end with the three teenage villains. Black leather, eyeliner and blazing guns abound; yet they create only a dull edge of terror. Mars actually becomes a caricature of a bad guy. Probably in an attempt to appeal to teenage boys under the age of 18, the movie has a lot of video game references in addition to Tommy being a hero. With the trend toward trying to make more movies PG-13 rather than R, we’re sure there were some interesting discussions about this being R rated. It clearly has a mentality aimed at teen boys not yet old enough to get a driver’s license.