Kidnap (2017)
Directed by Luis Prieto
A mother (in her Minivan) stops at nothing to recover her kidnapped son.
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What critics say influenced Kidnap
This, in a nutshell, is the whole movie, which suggests, for the most part, a maternal-vigilante answer to Steven Spielberg’s 1971 cult classic “ Duel ,” an intensely gripping, made-for-television thriller that pitted motorist Dennis Weaver against a mysteriously aggressive truck driver.
Prieto, obviously inspired by Steven Spielberg's TV-movie classic "Duel," follows that film's lead by sticking to Karla's point of view.
Imagine if someone were to try to remake the classic Steven Spielberg highway chase movie, “Duel,” except none of the people associated with the production knew how to make a movie.
The first two-thirds of the film is a little like Steven Spielberg’s classic TV-movie “Duel,” which was nothing but a lone driver against a malevolent truck.
Kidnap is an asinine child-abduction thriller spliced with a touch of the early Steven Spielberg TV movie Duel , and the most likable thing about it is that it is utter, unabashed garbage.
It’s more or less a “Taken” clone, swapping Liam Neeson for Halle Berry in a minivan, and Europe for Bayou Country in Louisiana.
It’s a chase movie and, in intention, “Kidnap” is more like “Speed” than “Taken.”
The first 20 minutes or so, as Karla races through highway traffic after the kidnappers’ car, makes you hopeful that Kidnap's creators might try to sustain a feature-length, nonstop vehicle chase: Speed meets Taken.
Written by Knate Lee and directed by Luis Prieto, the movie is basically a one-character, mama-bear version of Taken.
Perhaps inspired by the success of Taken and its imitators, Kidnap stars Berry as a determined mother who does everything she can to rescue her young son from the criminals who have abducted him.
“Kidnap” is effectively “Taken” if the abducted child’s parent were a normal person and not a retired torturer with a very special set of skills, but the movie takes things a little bit too far in that direction.
Tom Hardy was fantastic in 2014’s “Locke” as he drove a BMW from Birmingham to London, while his life fell apart through a series of phone calls, just to be there in time for the woman with whom he had a one-night stand to deliver their baby.
(Obviously screenwriter Knate Lee, a producer on Bad Grandpa and various Jackass films, wrote this as an homage to the eloquent, introspective dialogue from Tom Hardy’s Locke.)
“You took the wrong kid,” Berry says, paraphrasing Mel Gibson’s “Give me back my son” from the eerily similar “Ransom.”
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It really makes one appreciate the basic competence of The Call , another kidnapping thriller that Berry spent much of sitting down (is this a thing she’s into?), not to mention the deranged arty camp of the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Boy Next Door , which similarly took a Lifetime Original scenario and ran it into the ground.