Snatched is one of
those disappointing high-concept, mid-budget, star-driven Hollywood pictures
that seems to come around every so often. It has the right cast, a fun premise,
and a few funny moments, but otherwise just sits there on screen collecting dust.
The basic fish-out-of-water adventure comedy plotting finds a dopey daughter
(Amy Schumer) and dotty mother (the great Goldie Hawn in her first role in
fifteen years—sadly she should’ve waited longer) on a South American vacation.
They inevitably get kidnapped and must cease their squabbling long enough to
survive and maybe, just maybe, learn a little about themselves along the way.
On this sturdy, predictable structure director Jonathan Levine (The Night Before) and screenwriter Kate
Dippold (The Heat) pile flat, simple,
one-note scenes. This is a movie that only can hold one idea, and often only
one person, in a frame, plodding simply without escalation from plot point to
plot point, allowing its performers just enough personality to fill out just
barely more than a trailer’s worth of entertainment.
Cut together with journeyman boredom in every choice – a
tourism brochure montage of establishing shots, a slow-mo dance sequence or
two, vistas of B-roll you’d find on a hotel lobby TV – the whole endeavor could
only succeed with diminished expectations. It’s too thin and grindingly
workmanlike in its impersonal bare-bones competence, flatly staged and
unimaginatively developed. Comedy and action work best with surprise: an
unexpected swerve, a shock reveal, an eccentric resolution. Here we get a smattering
of these moments. In an opening scene, Schumer’s boyfriend (Randall Park) says
he’s breaking up with her and she responds, “When?” Later a grizzled jungle
guide (Christopher Meloni) is asked if a piece of fruit is okay. “Yeah, sure,”
he replies, then takes a beat and adds, “Oh! You mean to eat? Probably not.”
Funny. So too are Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack as vacationing gal pals intensely
interested in looking out for their fellow foreign ladies because you simply
never can trust a foreign vacation. (There’s unexamined Ugly Americanism here,
natch.) But we’re talking silly little grace notes on the edges of a leaden
comedy, flat-footed and tone-deaf, in which two American women get kidnapped
and flail around Latin American stereotypes for 80 minutes.
Why take Hawn, capable of effervescently charming
performances, and make her a dowdy scold? Why take Schumer who, at her best,
can lampoon awkward social issues in casually biting satire, and make her a
routine R-rated comedy-style stunted adult-child? They’re allowed to play
against type to fit the dragging constraints of a hectic and unfunny action
plot that’s so narrative heavy it rarely pauses to let its leads breathe. Their
best moments allow the two of them space for banter that feels like a real
testy mother-daughter relationship, one with some history and tension that
could flower with room to grow. Instead they’re shoved into tumbles down muddy
jungle roads and made to slog through tone-deaf humor. When they arrive at a
distant village, it’s a cue for smug eye-rolling and flailing gross-out humor
at the expense of the native’s customs and well-meaning doctors, culminating in
a sequence involving a tapeworm that’s just flat out nasty. The movie just
doesn’t have a point of view, has no idea how to maximize the inherent charms
of its cast or activate any sense of tension or suspense in its premise. The
emptiness just makes it seem limp and sad, so much running around and yelling
and frantic flailing for naught.
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