Save yourself and just stay at home
Audience likely to feel like hostages watching film about vacationers being abducted
Not to take the air out of what is meant to be a bit of light entertainment, but with just a slight shift in tone, Snatched could play as a sly refutation of American colonialism. Two women vacationing in Ecuador are kidnapped for ransom, escape from the abductors, accidentally kill a couple of them, and start an international incident.
As it stands, Snatched is merely culturally tone-deaf, and only intermittently funny. Amy Schumer continues to show the lengths to which she’ll abase herself for her comic art — in one very funny scene, her boyfriend (Randall Park), announces he’s breaking up with her, and after a moment of stunned silence she asks: “When?”
But Goldie Hawn, last seen on the big screen during the early years of the second Bush administration, deserves a better welcome-back than to be cast as Linda, a nutty mom with a cat fixation. This is such an old, tired cliché that if it were an actual cat its owner would have it put down.
But when daughter Emily (Schumer), can’t find anyone else to accompany her to Ecuador sans boyfriend, Mom steps up. Cut to scenes of Linda misunderstanding English spoken with an Ecuadorean accent and warning of kidnappers and worse if they step outside their gated resort.
Turns out she’s right on that last point. Tom Bateman pops up as James, a fellow vacationer who’s either sleazy or just really friendly. But a day trip into the countryside ends with mother and daughter in the clutches of Morgado (Óscar Jaenada), who wants $100,000 for their release. Yes, Morgado has a name, although it’s instructive to note that his colleagues appear in the credits merely as “tattooed kidnapper” and “kidnapper #2.”
From here, the story by Katie Dippold (The Heat, Ghostbusters), bounces among the kidnappees, Linda’s stay-at-home son (Ike Barinholtz), an ineffectual state department employee (Bashir Salahuddin), and a couple of would-be rescuers played by Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack. There’s also a jungle adventurer (Christopher Meloni), although the more time we spend with him, the more likely it seems that he just binge-watched the Crocodile Dundee franchise and then robbed a costume shop.
They’re fine characters but director Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, Warm Bodies), doesn’t know what to do with them, especially when more than one appears on the screen at the same time. And so we’re left with Schumer and Hawn reacting to a variety of improbable crises. Will they make it out alive? You may decide that $12 is too high a ransom to find out.