Halle Berry does A-grade driving, screaming in B-movie
The Seattle Times
There’s a moment, midway through the low-rent action flick “Kidnap,” in which things come to an abrupt and utter stop (a car has crashed into a tree), and the pause is so long I thought the movie genuinely was trying to figure out, on the fly, what to do next. With its amusing verb of a title (it’s as if “Titanic” were called “Drown”), “Kidnap” has a tossed-together sameness to it, like a salad made up only of tired lettuce.
It has the simplest of plots: Karla (Halle Berry) momentarily turns her back on her 6-year-old (Sage Correa) in a park, only to have him kidnapped (saw that coming, didn’t you?) by some thoroughly nasty specimens. She jumps into her minivan to follow them. And drives. And screams. And drives. And screams.
Should the apocalypse come, I definitely want Karla on my side; this woman could drive through the flames of hell and emerge unscathed, with great hair to boot. That poor minivan suffers numerous crashes, bashes, airborne projectiles, snarling intruders and other indignities, and yet it just keeps going, as does Karla, who’s sort of a human GPS system.
She keeps losing the car with her son in it, and then miraculously finding it again.
“Kidnap” runs out of gas long before the minivan does, and you watch saddened at the sight of Berry, a talented and charismatic Academy Award winner (“Monster’s Ball”), driving around screaming in a B-movie.
It’s A-grade driving and screaming, to be sure—couldn’t they use Karla in a “Fast and Furious” sequel?—but a waste, nonetheless.
‘KIDNAP’ 1.5 stars. With Halle Berry, Chris McGinn, Lew Temple, Sage Correa. Directed by Luis Prieto, from a screenplay by Knate Lee. 81 minutes. Rated R for violence and peril.