Halle Berry stuck in parental nightmare, low-grade thriller
Improbable action movies just got a new set of wheels: the increasingly scuffed-up Chrysler Town and Country driven down every stretch of freeway in the New Orleans area by a fiercely distraught Halle Berry in the child-abduction thriller “Kidnap.”
In this picture, directed with tons of extreme telephoto close-ups by Luis Prieto designed to MAXIMIZE TENSION in the MOST OBVIOUS POSSIBLE WAY, most of the angsting takes place in the driver’s seat, behind a steering wheel. Berry’s waitress character, Karla, is like the train in “Unstoppable,” if a train could drive a minivan. She’s in hot pursuit of the skeezy Louisiana vermin (Chris McGinn and Lew Temple) who swipe her adorable son (Sage Correa) as part of the family child-abduction business.
The snatching takes place at a park when Karla takes a call from her divorce lawyer. She’s wrangling over custody; the kidnapping puts those legal battles in the back seat for an hour or so of minimally diverting screen time, covering a day and a night of parental hell. Working from a no-frills script by Knate Lee, “Kidnap” wastes no time establishing who’s gone where. Minutes after losing track of her son, Karla spies him being stuffed into the back seat of a Mustang with no license plates, whisked away at high speed.
It’s a chase movie, and, in intention, “Kidnap” is more like “Speed” than “Taken.” It comes down firmly on the side of vigilante justice and shots of Berry in extreme close-up, alternating with slam cuts to her foot hitting the gas pedal, followed by a shot of the speedometer hitting 60 or 80.
The police are worthless in a movie like this. When breathless Karla does report the kidnapping to a precinct outside New Orleans, she gets the hurry-up-and-wait routine, and then scans the bulletin board full of smiling faces of other abducted children, and that’s that. It’s go time. This is a managed care scenario, and clearly mom is the only one who manages to care. The minivan awaits, though when its time eventually comes (spoiler alert), Berry takes a moment to pat the minivan hood twice, lovingly, like it’s Ol’ Paint about to expire in a Western.
The film’s visual quality, full of second-unit digital fuzz and variable cinematography, doesn’t help the film much. Whatever Prieto (“Bamboleho,” “Pusher”) can’t offer, composer Federico Jusid provides in spades to compensate, slathering electronic “Sicario”-type chords of dread over every threat. The plotting here is a series of eye rolls: At one point, having temporarily lost sight of her enemies, Karla has the fine luck to drive by a random parking lot as the antagonists are trading their Ford beater for a newer-model Volvo.
Berry’s own luck has been tougher. She hasn’t had the breaks or the roles she deserves, in any genre, really. For years, decades, all Berry needed to be was gorgeous, and gorgeous has a way of working against a woman in Hollywood after a while, if not from the very beginning.
With “Kidnap,” filmed in 2014 and then delayed while one distribution deal collapsed and another took its place, Berry acts as producer as well as star, and the script is meant as an action makeover (though Berry’s done her share of action movies). Call it a partial, tentative Liam Neesonization of her talents. “Kidnap” probably could’ve played into its feverish, violent, trashy side more aggressively. As is, something seems to be holding it back from its own monstrously exploitative premise, just as most of its highway pursuits appear to be stuck at O.J. Bronco speed, in the low 40 mph range. Sometimes realism is no fun at all.