He's a company man, a disciplined professional, with a stiff upper lip and an Australian accent. Thorne is supposed to work on Bowman's case, but there is a series of complications, and it takes Alice a while to trust him. In the mountains, Peter remains a hostage, held in a stunning location by rebels who are depicted in crude and desultory terms. Ryan and Crowe try hard to fill out their characters. It's as if his physique and his professionalism are guarantees of stability for an anxious and guilty Alice, trying to do the right thing by her husband and increasingly interested in the man whose job it is to rescue him.
Proximity brings some things out in the open, and they learn more about each other.
Thorne gets brownie points from Alice for his response to her disclosure of a recent miscarriage. But there's a lack of intimacy between the two characters. Director Taylor Hackford seems to have gone out of his way to avoid showing us anything resembling it. And, as it happens, there's much more of a sense of intimacy between the two men, a kind of shared, matey complicity. Alice and Thorne begin to look like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, with Dino in the Claude Rains role.