WARNING!!! EXCESSIVE USE OF THE WORD KIDNAP AHEAD! READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!
Released: August 2017
Director: Luis Prieto
Rated R
Run Time: 82 Minutes
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Genre: Action/Thriller/Crime
Cast:
Halle Berry: Karla Dyson
Sage Correa: Frankie
Chris McGinn: Margo
Lew Temple: Terry
Jason George: David
Kidnap thrillers have been around since the 40s. It’s a genre in which a person is abducted for ransom or for some other reason and a detective/hero has to find them. It’s a simple premise, that despite it’s simple nature can lead to some serious thrills. There have been a lot of great thrillers of this type over the years: Kiss The Girls, Prisoners, and Man on Fire. You also have foreign fare like Oldboy and Furie. As I have said about other films in the genre, what makes them so interesting and intense, is the level of tension and suspense involved. There’s almost always a time-crunch involved, which means the hero or heroes have a limited amount of time to find the victim alive. There was one film that kind of renewed interest in the genre, Pierre Morel’s Taken, starring Liam Neeson. This was a fantastic little thriller that focused on Liam Neeson’s character taking down a group of sex traffickers that kidnapped his daughter. This little movie inspired a lot of copy-cat thrillers since then, including Traded, 6 Bullets, and most recently Rambo: Last Blood. Some of them are pretty damn good, but others…..not so much. That brings me to Kidnap, an abduction thriller starring Halle Berry.
Kidnap follows Karla Dyson as she takes her son Frankie to a nearby park. Interrupted by a phone call, she returns only to find that Frankie disappeared. Frantically searching the park for her child, she sees him being dragged and forced into a car. Desperate, Karla follows the car in her minivan trying to get back her child. That’s it. That’s the whole movie. I’ve always maintained that when it comes to kidnap thrillers, the simpler it is, the better. That way, audiences don’t have to worry about getting sidetracked by nonsensical plots that have nothing to do with the main narrative. Focusing on the main character and her mission is the right move, and Kidnap does that. There’s a bit of a problem here, though. In order to really care about the protagonist’s plight, you need to give the villains some kind of motivation for kidnapping a loved one. It can be as simple as a ransom or intending to sell the victim into trafficking. It’s not that hard to give the bad guys a motivation, regardless of how simplistic it is. Any motivation is better than none, and we really aren’t given an explanation as to why Frankie was kidnapped. Even at the end of the film, we aren’t given any insight into why this happened. Understandably, stuff like this does happen in real life, but the way it happened here is contrived at best and lazy at worst. Kidnap is also frustratingly predictable.
Kidnap is Halle Berry’s second abduction thriller, with the first one being The Call. Admittedly, The Call is a vastly superior film in nearly every way, but one of the things that Kidnap has going for it, is Halle herself. I’ve never truly been a huge fan of hers, but I’ve never considered her a terrible actress. She’s not. With the right material, she’s absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, with Kidnap, she doesn’t really get a whole lot to do outside of looking panicked and freaking out. In fact, the majority of the film is focused on her face in her minivan. She does her absolute best with the material, and at times she’s very convincing. Honestly, though, I really liked the interaction that she had with her younger co-star towards the beginning of the film. That felt absolutely genuine. It’s when she’s in panic-mode that things tend to get a little over-the-top. Chris McGinn plays Margo, one of the two abductors. I have to admit, she can play a mean-looking lady with the best of them, but as I was saying above: No motivation, no threat. Not only that, some of the decisions that some of these characters make are so ludicrously stupid it’s amazing they can find their way out of a parking lot. Lew Temple plays Terry, the other kidnapper. With all due respect to Mr. Temple, this was a role that could have been played by anybody. He’s not given that much to do, and the film’s reveal of another villain is so last-minute and forced that it boggles the mind at how the script and screenplay got green-lit.
If there’s one thing that the film is not, at least not in my opinion, is boring. At 82 minutes long, the movie does move at a very brisk pace, despite the first two minutes of the film being company logos. I’m actually not kidding about that. There are no less than 6 animated logos including the Universal logo. Anyway, when Frankie gets snatched, the film embarks on a break-neck pace until the very end. I would imagine that for most people, that would be enough. If you’re entertained, that’s what matters, right? If you shift your brain into a certain mind-set, then yeah, it’s entertaining. The movie is basically one long car chase that has some pretty spectacular stunts and crashes. For the most part, those are filmed pretty well. There are some questionable editing choices that I find perplexing. There’s a moment early on in the chase, when there are multiple cuts inside of the minivan, but each of those cuts is book-ended by a fade to black. Why? It’s not like they needed that many cuts anyway. Not only that, there’s a moment towards the end of the film that involves a dog, but moments later, the dog disappears. Where did he go? Is he some kind of….Phantom Dog? Was he….dog-napped? These are the questions that I need answers to. The writing in this film is extremely pedestrian and laughable, if I’m being honest. The direction by Luis Prieto is not the worst I’ve seen, but he and the writer don’t seem to understand the difference between tension and suspense. Suspense is a situational thing when the audience has no idea what’s coming next. Tension is more about character interaction. There’s definitely tension in the film, but there’s no real suspense, because everybody’s seen this movie before.
That is what I would consider to be Kidnap’s greatest sin: It has no identity of its own. It’s a middle-of-the-road kidnap thriller that doesn’t innovate in any way and plows ahead. The Call, while being simplistic at times, had the benefit of shifting perspectives: One from the view of the 911 operator and the one from the abducted girl. That was interesting to me and it was handled pretty well. Here, we don’t have that kind of innovation. I realize that a movie of this sort doesn’t require something like that, but if you want to make your film stand out, then you need to do something that we really haven’t seen before. So, is Kidnap a terrible film? I personally don’t think so, there are things here that I like. I liked Halle’s performance, and I liked the car chases and the fact that the film doesn’t let up once it starts going. But there are things here that should’ve been better in the hands of a better film-maker. Had this movie gone directly to video, I think the reception might have been okay, but this was a theatrical release, and it just doesn’t quite work for that format.
My Final Recommendation: I was kidnapped for 82 minutes and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. 6.5/10