Kidnap is mercifully under 80-minutes (sans credits) and just an incredibly dumb movie, which would be fine if there was any actual suspense or thrills, two key ingredients for a suspense-thriller after all.
Kidnap
(2017)
Genre(s): Suspense/Thriller, Action
Universal | R – 83 min. – $34.98 | October 31, 2017
Date Published: 11/01/2017 | Author: The Movieman
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THE MOVIE — 1.5/5 |
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I’ve seen my fair share of dumb, mind-numbingly stupid, movies but Kidnap takes the cake. It’s not hard to see why it had trouble getting distributed after Relativity saw financial difficulties before startup Aviron Pictures took a gamble, and financially, probably paid off. But boy was the film absolutely hilarious, maybe its only redeeming quality. The plot is all too simple following Karla Dyson (HALLE BERRY), a doting divorced mother working hard as a waitress at a café to help support her son, Frankie (SAGE CORREA). One day they are visiting a busy park when she takes a phone call and leaving her son out of eyesight, though using the “Marco Polo” game to keep ear tabs on him… for some reason. Woundn’t you know it, he goes missing and in her frantic search, she sees Frankie being pulled into a crappy 1990s era Ford Mustang, with faux leather car bra. Her attempts to hang on to the car are futile and she gives chase in her apparently indestructible movie mini-van.
The rest of the movie pretty much has Berry making faces toward the camera, ones of anguish, horror, sadness, etc and spouting lines to herself that were absolutely awful. The problem with this suspense-thriller is there’s no suspense and little thrill. In fact, you have characters just acting incredibly dumb, albeit with darkly hilarious results such as when Karla pushes one of the kidnappers out the side of her minivan when the kidnapper, for some odd reason, tries to kill her while Karla was driving. Why not just kill her before then? Early on, they show she has a knife when pressed against Freddie’s neck in order to deter Karla from chasing them. Whatever. Halle Berry has been in quite a few stinkers since her Oscar win for Monster’s Ball from Catwoman to New Year’s Eve to Dark Tide, but I think even in those she did seem to try, or at least had more to work with, and yes, I am counting Catwoman in there. That said, The Call, even with its clichés, was a solid piece of suspense, sadly Kidnap was not.
The film was helmed by Luis Prieto marking his first American feature-length project, though the film was made in 2014 and got stuck in limbo before finally being thrown into theaters in 2017, but honestly, not only can’t I imagine how something like this got to theaters, but how Halle Berry could read that script and not run as far away from it as possible. Speaking of the script which was written by Knate Lee marking only his second credited screenplay with The New Mutants coming up. All in all, it still boggles my mind how a movie like Kidnap got made in the first place. Is it the worst thing ever made? Of course not, but I expected more, maybe along the lines of The Call which in itself had dumb moments, yet still was entertaining. This, however, was not, but at least was worth a few laughs. |
SPECIAL FEATURES – 1.0/5 |
| This release comes with a slightly title-embossed slip cover. Inside is a redemption code for the Digital HD copy. The only feature included is A Thrilling Behind-the-Scenes Look Inside Kidnap (3:13; HD) featurette which is nothing more than press kit material. |
VIDEO – 4.5/5 |
| Universal unloads Kidnap onto Blu-ray, presented with a 2.40 widescreen aspect ratio and a respectable 1080p high-definition transfer. I found the picture to be quite good, especially when it came to the sharp and nicely defined detail as well as bright colors. As a good portion of the film takes place in a vehicle, the motion is smooth. There were no obvious or noticeable signs of artifacting or aliasing so, albeit no surprise, this is a clean transfer. |
AUDIO – 4.0/5 |
| The disc includes a standard but still solid DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track which does offer up clear dialogue levels primarily from the center channel as the front and rear channels are reserved for the car chase scenes hearing the honking of the horns or, in a few instances, cars crashing, one even flipping over. I imagine if this was given a fuller 7 channel option or Atmos, this would’ve been an excellent sounding lossless track, as it is, it’s adequate. |
OVERALL – 1.5/5 |
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Overall, Kidnap is mercifully under 80-minutes (sans credits) and just an incredibly dumb movie, which would be fine if there was any actual suspense or thrills, two key ingredients for a suspense-thriller after all. Even Halle Berry didn’t exactly deliver a believable performance, though she’s not aided with stellar dialogue either. If you want a few laughs, might be worthy of a rental, otherwise just pass this on by. The Blu-ray meanwhile has great video, good audio and a throwaway bonus feature. |
Check out some more 1080p screen caps by going to page 2. Please note, these do contain spoilers.