Comedy misguided from the start
Promising young writer Katie Dippold, who wrote “The Heat” and “Ghostbusters,” strikes out with “Snatched,” her third feature.
The mother-daughter kidnapping comedy starring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn is a huge disappointment — and, for Schumer, is a low moment in a career that has been peaking.
As Emily, Schumer plays her characteristic problematic white-girl character, a selfish, selfie-taking narcissist. But the film has no sharp satire to puncture that image, as some of her best work from Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer” has managed to pull off.
Instead, “Snatched” feels like a rough sketch of a movie rather than a fleshedout, joke-dense script.
Perhaps it’s a bad match of writer and star, with Schumer and Dippold working together for the first time. The story follows Emily, in the wake of a bad breakup, who — for lack of a better option (all of her friends seem to hate her) — takes her mom, Linda (Hawn), on a nonrefundable vacation to Ecuador.
On their second day in Ecuador, Emily manages to get the two of them kidnapped while trying to impress an attractive Brit named James (Tom Bateman). The hapless blondes set off on an unlikely journey while trying to escape their captors; along the way, they learn a little something about themselves.
The story has about as much suspense as it has laughs (not many).
The script can’t decide whether viewers are supposed to like Emily or hate her. She’s a bad person who treats her loved ones poorly and leans on her perceived stupidity and naivete to make her way in the world. The film eventually abandons that thread, steering into girl-power territory and resolving the story with the message that women can rely on themselves.
In other ways, too, the film wavers. One gross-out scene, for example, feels out of place and is then cut too short to have any true effect.
“Snatched,” directed by Jonathan Levine, lacks energy and punch as it relies on half-baked ideas that aren’t fully formed.
From the premise, “Snatched” seemingly might prove horribly racist. The film does rely heavily on some very stale Latino stereotypes and trots out a truly awful joke about what the word might sound like with an accent.
More often than not, the movie paints white women in a bad light — as shallow, man-obsessed dolts who care about performing their lives solely for social media.
What’s offensive about “Snatched” is the dreadfully tired conceit on which it’s based — that these women are self-obsessed creatures who believe themselves to be in constant danger of kidnapping, rape or human trafficking from foreigners.