Ms-adventures in buddy comedy
I T was supposed to be a lark. And then, almost immediately, it went off the rails.
I’m not referring to the mother-daughter vacation gone wrong in “Snatched,” but rather the experience of watching it. The flaccid Amy Schumer-Goldie Hawn comedy disappoints, not least because it’s timed to Mother’s Day. Treating your mom to this one would be akin to handing her a bouquet of dead flowers.
Schumer is Emily Middleton, who’s flailing financially and romantically. Ditched by her hipster boyfriend (Randall Park), Emily needs someone to fill in on her planned resort trip to Ecuador. Enter her mom, Linda (Hawn), an overprotective, sheltered woman who lives with multiple cats and padlocks.
The casting of Hawn as a stick in the mud is all wrong. I hoped she’d throw off that mantle midway through, but “The First Wives Club” star doesn’t get her spark on until about the 89th minute of 90.
Mother and daughter find themselves abducted after Emily’s conquest (Tom Bateman) drives them into a remote village. Just as quickly, they escape — the title’s a bit of a misnomer, although given the volume of vagina jokes, it also seems inevitable. Schumer’s trademark bawdy body humor has that not-so- fresh feeling here; “your tit’s out,” a line that’s used more than once, isn’t the punch line the film thinks it is. And her character is extremely unlikable: You can only pull off whiny self-centeredness with a decent script, like the one Schumer wrote for herself in 2015’s “Trainwreck.”
A greatest hits of white people’s fears about international travel ensues as Emily and Linda flee into the jungle. “Snatched” isn’t blatantly racist, but it wanders into blurry territory with jokes about accents. For a female buddy comedy, it’s pretty ironic that nearly all the laughs come from the men: Ike Barinholtz as Linda’s clingy other kid, Christopher Meloni as a doofy jungle adventurer. Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack are amusing but appear too briefly. More than anything, “Snatched” feels like bad comic chemistry all around: Schumer and Hawn never find their bantering groove, director Jonathan Levine has no idea how to direct them and “Ghostbusters” writer Katie Dippold’s screenplay might have worked with actors with the awkward comic timing of, say, Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. As it is, there are countless moments during which Hawn and Schumer simply stare at each other, seemingly as baffled as I was by the dullness of it all. The only thing snatched here was an hour and a half of my life.