Luis Prieto's Kidnap is an unpretentious thriller that's 75% car chase and 25% backwoods survival horror. With a fairly awful Halle Berry performance, a script that makes doubly sure the audience doesn't miss anything, and presumably some Louisiana tax incentives, Prieto and company crank out 80-something minutes of watchable popcorn cinema.
Kidnap was slated for release in October 2015, before distributor Relativity Media ran into financial trouble. It's sat on the shelf for two years but doesn't feel appreciably dusty — or, rather, its dedication to no-frills suspense stands out even more in 2017. This isn't to say Kidnap is some kind of mistreated masterpiece. It's just a movie about a mom whose kid gets nabbed, and her dogged pursuit of the rednecks who nabbed him. That's literally it.
The car chases keep the blood pumping (although, oddly, every time Berry steps on the gas the speedometer is shown winding up from 50 miles an hour), with a couple solid action beats. DP Flavio Martínez Labiano (The Shallows) puts in some of his least inspired work, and Federico Jusid's score is equal parts anonymous treacle and Hans Zimmer string arrangements. When the plot reaches a literal dead end, the filmmakers stage another car crash. There's a sequence toward the end that nods to grimier hillbilly horror fare, but never gets nasty. Kidnap could've used some grit — it fits too neatly into the "2 p.m. on TBS" slot.
The most interesting part of Kidnap is how it reverses the usual dynamics of race and gender in Taken-style action movies. Here a woman of color is searching for her kid, and the kidnappers are low-income white people — working for an unseen third party. That said: Obviously this movie wrapped production before The Trump Era. I guess sometimes you just hit the bullseye.
Unless you're Halle Berry, and apparently these are the only scripts you get now.
This article appears in Aug 3-10, 2017.