As enduring screen personas go, Bruce Willis tends to be as easy to like as he is difficult to kill. And although his Die Hard films were called that for a reason, it's Willis's willingness to look vulnerable that sets him apart from contemporary showoffs like Vin Diesel.

In the opening minutes of his violent new thriller, Hostage, we find Willis as Jeff Talley, a scruffy-bearded LAPD negotiator calmly talking down a hostage-taker. Three dead people and one failed negotiation later, he's a broken man questioning both his career and his very existence. It's classic Willis, not only eliciting our sympathy but setting up a sudden jump to a few years later, when a clean-shaven Talley has become the easygoing sheriff of a quiet California town. Because this is a Bruce Willis film, we know, from the minute Talley's squad car passes three ominous-looking teenagers in a beat-up pickup truck, that the calm can't last. When the juvenile trio's attempted car theft progresses to a full-scale home invasion, abduction, and cop killing, Sheriff Talley is drawn, inevitably if reluctantly, into the bloody fray. Throughout Hostage, Willis exhibits the determined weariness he brought to his Die Hard films, but with fewer distracting wisecracks.

Most of the rest of the action takes place within a mansion on a hill, complete with a high-tech multicamera security system and an indoor waterfall. True to Willis's form, however, this little fortress soon becomes the Alamo.

Ben Foster, a dead ringer for Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, is frighteningly good as Mars, one of the three hopeless teens storming the castle, and his manic desperation lends a post-Columbine air to the Clockwork Orange-style ultraviolence. Likewise, Jonathan Tucker, as one of his two accomplices, brings a welcome internal conflict to the story line.

These are strong characters, but filmgoers looking for a plausible plot are advised to lower their expectations. With awesome explosions, swirling choppers, and copious automatic-weapon fire, the film often feels like it was written by, and for, adolescent boys.

Nonetheless, the presence of the older, wiser Willis grounds Hostage, and although it is by no means great cinema, it's a fine popcorn movie and a chance to see a master of the genre teaching the Vin Diesels of the world how it's done.