MOVIE REVIEWS | INTERVIEWS | YOUTUBE |  NEWS |  EDITORIALS | EVENTS | AUDIO | ESSAYS | ARCHIVES | CONTACT |
 PHOTOS | COMING SOON| EXAMINER.COM FILM ARTICLES ||HOME

                                                            
Sunday, August 6, 2017

MOVIE REVIEW/Kidnap 
Running Away From An Appallingly Bad Movie

Halle Berry as Karla Dyson in Luis Prieto's "Kidnap".  Aviron Pictures
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Sunday, August 6, 2017

 Wow, do things ever go off the rails and roads in "Kidnap".  I'm not talking about the preposterous kidnapping Halle Berry's Karla Dyson character sets in motion by leaving her six year old son Frankie (Sage Correa) alone to walk away and take a phone call in a noisy amusement park.  Yes, that moment of scripted madness by Knate Lee is the raison d'etre for Luis Prieto's appallingly bad dramatic thriller.  "Kidnap" careens downhill at lawbreaking-speed from there, landing straight into the swamps of Louisiana, where it is set.

Grimy, bloodied and feral, Ms. Berry grits her teeth throughout this mess as she sometimes chases on foot two white-trash kidnappers (in a car) making big money from their child-kidnapping ring.  One of the kidnappers even sabotages the ring near the end.  Huh?  I'm shaking my head even now -- and I actually paid to see this film.  (So what does that make me?)

"Kidnap" has poor dialogue, a poor premise and takes the "vengeance genre" if you will, and spins it into a whole new kind of stupid.  Mr. Prieto's film is easily the year's worst to date.  The only saving grace is that "Kidnap" is just 82 minutes long.  (It felt longer.)  "Kidnap" had suffered delays in its theatrical release -- the film was supposed to be released almost 18 months ago.  I could see why "Kidnap" was delayed.  It needed more delaying.

As I watched "Kidnap" in utter incredulity I felt sorry for Ms. Berry, who has had a tough life onscreen  ("Catwoman", "Gothika", "Perfect Stranger", "The Call") in these intervening years since her "Monster's Ball" Oscar win in 2002, and an even tougher life offscreen.  Ms. Berry has tons of great acting ability ("Jungle Fever", "Frankie And Alice") but I don't think she's had enough good screenplays to showcase it.  She tries in "Kidnap".  Tries hard.  Maybe too hard.  Mr. Lee's awful, incoherent script makes it seem as if Ms. Berry is being too theatrical.

Aside from Mr. Prieto's film leaving no room for suspension of disbelief -- how can you suspend disbelief in the face of pure nonsense? -- "Kidnap" has an extremely short attention span.  Characters, including Karla, get schizophrenic about their goals.  Admittedly, having your child kidnapped would send you into a frenzy of panic, fear, rage, confusion and helplessness -- and Karla's primal mother is unleashed as she gives dogged pursuit of ugly zombie-like redneck criminals we barely glimpse to reclaim her son.  But again it is Mr. Lee's screenplay that subverts any credibility Karla as a character strives for.

The movie is a monotonous, loud, metal-crashing show with rapid-fire edits, screeching tires and gunfire.  There are inactive and inept police, who in any other realm would have treated Karla like Sandra Bland for some of what she does here.  The police in "Kidnap" aren't even eating donuts or Bananas Foster, for goodness sake -- they are virtually absent.  I can safely say that watching O.J. Simpson's slow speed Bronco chase in 1994 was vastly more entertaining than the endless tire-burning of this car chase to nowhere, one that barely disguised the thin screenplay on offer.

What's more troubling is "Kidnap" spends its opening five minutes exploiting and playing on our emotions for a cute, adorable six-year-old child, then exploits that child by pulling the rug out from under him in service of a nakedly cynical and cheap moviemaking ploy.  By any measure "Kidnap" is a force-fed exercise, one that tries too hard to be a rock-em, sock-em high-stakes rough-ride but is instead a colossal embarassment and insult to any moviegoer's common sense.

Mr. Prieto's "Kidnap", which Ms. Berry produced, needed endless rewrites.  Maybe it needed not to be made at all.  Ms. Berry should have decided to kidnap this movie.

Also with: Chris McGinn, Lew Temple, Dana Gourrier.



"Kidnap" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for violence and peril.  The film's running time is one hour and 22 minutes.
COPYRIGHT 2017.  POPCORNREEL.COM.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.                Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW
MOVIE REVIEWS | INTERVIEWS | YOUTUBE |  NEWS |  EDITORIALS | EVENTS | AUDIO | ESSAYS | ARCHIVES | CONTACT | PHOTOS | COMING SOON| EXAMINER.COM FILM ARTICLES ||HOME