Kidnap (2017)
A mother stops at nothing to recover her kidnapped son.
Director:
Luis PrietoWriter:
Knate LeeStars:
In the US, a child goes missing every 40 seconds. You never think it
will happen to you. Until it does. Alone and scared, Karla Dyson (Halle
Berry) is unwilling to leave the fate of her son's life in someone
else's hands. When she catches a glimpse of the abductors speeding away,
she decides to fight back. In a heart pounding race against time, Kate
begins a high speed pursuit and will stop at nothing to save her son's
life.
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
4 August 2017 (USA)Also Known As:
DesaparecidoFilming Locations:
New Orleans, Louisiana, USABox Office
Budget:
$21.000.000 (estimated)Opening Weekend:
$10.210.000 (USA) (4 August 2017)Gross:
$10.210.000 (USA) (4 August 2017)Company Credits
Technical Specs
Runtime:
Halle Berry stars as a desperate mom trying to save her son from ruthless abductors in Luis Prieto's thriller.
The limits of maternal instinct are relentlessly tested in Kidnap,
a tightly wound actioner that draws on Halle Berry’s intense
performance to power this fast-paced feature. Despite its rather generic
TV-movie premise, a clever script and consistently gratifying plot
twists provide plenty of momentum that could propel Aviron Pictures'
late-summer release to decent returns among audiences weary of a season
of studio misfires.As a divorced single mother, Karla Dyson (Berry) works a thankless waitressing job serving rude customers at a New Orleans-area diner to support her 6-year-old son Frankie (Sage Correa), the light of her life. On a rare, carefree outing to the park one weekend after a particularly stressful shift, Frankie disappears while Karla's distracted by a phone call from her lawyer regarding her ex-husband's attempt to obtain primary custody of their son.
Thinking at first he might just be playing a game, Karla searches the park to no avail, then ventures into the parking lot where she glimpses an unknown woman dragging Frankie into a beat-up old Mustang GT with the license plates removed. Karla runs after the Ford as it pulls out of the parking lot, taking a bad fall and dropping her cellphone as the car speeds away. Barely hesitating, she jumps into her Chrysler minivan and gives pursuit, frantically searching for her phone.
At this point, most distraught parents would probably pull over and find a way to contact law enforcement, but convinced she's on her own, Karla follows the Mustang, which leads her on a perilous high-speed chase through freeway traffic. The kidnappers' attempt to escape only strengthens her resolve as Karla relentlessly closes in on the Ford, finally cornering the car on a deserted highway median. With Frankie's life at stake, she confronts his abductors in a desperate attempt to negotiate his release.
Screenwriter Knate Lee mines Karla's single-minded determination to
protect her child for all it's worth, sometimes testing the bounds of
plausibility. This tendency becomes especially apparent when Karla's
alone in her car without a phone and there's no opportunity for
conversation, so she improvises a reassuring dialogue with Frankie that
borders on the outright silly, or predictably prays aloud for God's
intervention.
Despite these occasional outbursts, most of the plot plays out like
one extended chase scene, which is exactly the point, as Karla tries to
catch up with Frankie's abductors. As she grows more desperate and their
evasion tactics reach extremes, Karla's pursuit strategies evolve,
becoming more calculated and far riskier. When her attempts at
contacting law enforcement prove fruitless, she relentlessly pushes
herself beyond limits she didn't even know she had.
Berry has capably demonstrated her action expertise in numerous low-budget thrillers, as well as four installments of the X-Men franchise
in her role as Storm, so her ability to command the screen
single-handedly here proves surprisingly satisfying. Lee's narrative
template, which overlays a child-abduction scenario with a reluctant
heroine's self-actualization, adds up to more than a soccer mom on a
mission; it gets directly to the primal issues of survival and maternal
instinct. Berry (the mother of two kids herself) is at her best when
she's dipping into this deep well of emotion as she ferociously hunts
down her child's kidnappers with little regard for her own safety (or
that of the numerous victims of her epically distracted driving).
Spanish filmmaker Luis Prieto, who directed the 2012 remake of Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher,
adroitly leverages Berry's familiar face and onscreen persona to
consistently escalate tension, as DP Flavio Labiano and editor Avi
Youabian construct their shots and action sequences to enable her to
totally own the screen.
I
believe every well known actor leads in at least one film not deserving
of their talents. Kidnap is that kind of film and Halle Berry is truly
trying her hardest to sell this film.
As a mother of a young boy, Halle finds herself in pursuit of a abductor of her child in her SUV.......and honestly that's really it in terms of plot. The plot and events are so thin that even the editing is struggling to warrant its 95 minute run time in a story that's only worth about 35 minutes, so the director and editor find themselves using fast, strobe like cuts of Halle in pursuit (it looks really bad and out of place), and slow extended periods of cars just driving on the highway. While the film tries to make you root for Halle, I couldn't shake the fact that her characters negligence is the reason this story is even happening.
Kidnap is a film that was filmed in 2014, and still in June 2017 hasn't been released officially and I see why. It's not the worst film ever, as there is some ridiculous fun to be had with this, but with sloppy editing, and a script that few directors could even try to elevate, Kidnap leaves nothing missed if you turned in the other direction and walked away.
As a mother of a young boy, Halle finds herself in pursuit of a abductor of her child in her SUV.......and honestly that's really it in terms of plot. The plot and events are so thin that even the editing is struggling to warrant its 95 minute run time in a story that's only worth about 35 minutes, so the director and editor find themselves using fast, strobe like cuts of Halle in pursuit (it looks really bad and out of place), and slow extended periods of cars just driving on the highway. While the film tries to make you root for Halle, I couldn't shake the fact that her characters negligence is the reason this story is even happening.
Kidnap is a film that was filmed in 2014, and still in June 2017 hasn't been released officially and I see why. It's not the worst film ever, as there is some ridiculous fun to be had with this, but with sloppy editing, and a script that few directors could even try to elevate, Kidnap leaves nothing missed if you turned in the other direction and walked away.
The camera is mixture of drama, full of action, sadness, and it totally fits into the theme that everything is tried hard and harder in this movie.
The effects are not relevant here, daily issues and daily drama are meant to be filled with high spectular CGI.
The music is cheezy and does not fit into the drama genre, but the landline music is nice.
In some moments, actually most of the time I am asking myself where is the thrill since we are talking about a thriller, but as I said already a lot of times, it seems like we have a better hostage drama than a thriller. But I cannot help myself than giving
5/10 genre
4/10 overall
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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