The difference between John McClane, the tarnished, heroic cop who catapulted Bruce Willis to stardom in the “Die Hard” movies, and Jeff Talley, the tarnished, heroic cop the actor plays in “Hostage,” is essentially a matter of hairlines and witticisms, or lack thereof.

Once again, Willis plays a lawman confronted with a touchy hostage situation. Once again, his own family is endangered. And yet, for all its pyrotechnics and serpentine plotting, “Hostage” never comes remotely close to synthesizing the wily powder-keg thrill of “Die Hard.” “Yippee-kay-yay!” has become “yippee-kay-yawn.” Mostly.

Adapted from the like-titled novel by prolific TV writer and pulp fictionist Robert Crais (“Miami Vice”), the movie begins on a promising note, with a tightrope-tense hostage scenario played out near the downtown Los Angeles skyline. Running the show is Talley, the LAPD's top hostage negotiator. As Talley tries to talk down a deranged gunman — while simultaneously weighing mortality probabilities and sniper angles — we get a brief, tantalizing glimpse of hostage negotiation as forensic art: A high-stakes hybrid of risk assessment, psychology and salesmanship.

As it must, the crisis ends disastrously for Talley, who reacts as all movie cops inevitably do. Haunted by feelings of guilt and inadequacy, he shaves his beard, cuts his stringy hippie hair, loses his sense of humor and moves his family (including an alienated teenager played by Willis’ real-life daughter, Rumer) to a virtually crime-free suburb in nearby Ventura County, where he takes over as police chief.

In essence, Talley ceases to have a personality, and one of the problems with “Hostage” is that he never properly sprouts a new one. Willis might be aiming for dramatic truth by playing the character affectation-free, but in an escapist bonbon such as “Hostage,” it gets dull quickly. Have a little fun, and save the high-minded actorly restraint for “Vera Drake.”

Were it not so convoluted, the rest of the story would write itself. His negotiation mojo gone forever — or so he thinks — Talley gladly surrenders command authority when a bungled home invasion results in a dead cop and puts his sleepy hamlet on national television.

Unfortunately for Talley, this is no run-of-the-mill hostage situation. One of the crooks (“Northfork” oddity Ben Foster) is a Columbinesque Goth nut ball who harbors a powerful infatuation on the family's budding teenage daughter (Michelle Horn from “Stuart Saves His Family”). Unbeknownst to the police, the owner of the house (Kevin Pollak from “A Few Good Men”) is actually a numbers runner for a shady crime syndicate, and has a time-sensitive CD-ROM on the premises that sinister, powerful men will do just about anything to retrieve. To top it off, the house itself is a technical fortress, complete with security cameras, armored windows and secret passageways.

Obviously, screenwriter Doug Richardson (“Bad Boys”) has given director Florent Emilio Siri much to juggle, and little of it transitions smoothly. With the lives of his family hanging in the balance, Talley is blackmailed into reclaiming command of the hostage negotiation, but his subsequent actions often defy logic. For instance, the crime syndicate people tell him specifically not to let anybody in or out of the house, but the first thing Talley does is arrange for the removal of an injured victim. By the end of the whole messy affair, you want to interrogate him for answers.

Director Siri's grasp of psychological subtlety is what you might expect
from a filmmaker whose most recognizable credit to date is the video game hit “Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.” Specifically, the director never finds a way to articulate Talley's central dilemma: That he can buy time for his own family only by selling out another. Siri proves quite the master at lighting stuntmen on fire and filming them, but in terms of its storytelling, “Hostage” is less than captivating.