by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched a
recording of a Lifetime movie from last November, We Have Your Husband, supposedly based on a true story about a
kidnapping in Mexico in 2007 — though the trailers shown for it then had not
made it clear that it was set in Mexico and the only real difference between it
and quite a number of other Lifetime movies in which the heroine’s bucolic
existence is disrupted by some horrible peril for herself and/or her family is
that the scenes of the bucolic existence in the exposition are accompanied by
mariachi music, strummed guitars and other cheesy music cues to establish
“Mexicanicity.” The woman in peril is Jayne Valseca (Teri Polo), a U.S.-born
blonde who 15 years previously married a Mexican, Eduardo Valseca (Esai
Morales, about the only person in this cast I’d heard of before), and settled with
him on his ranch outside the Mexican town of Santa Natale (“birthplace of the
saints”?) in the state of Guanajuato. All is going well for them — though he’s
the son of a Mexican media baron (“the William Randolph Hearst of Mexico,”
we’re obligingly told in the dialogue) he only has a small income plus a
$500,000 bank account that is solely in his name, but he’s got a Texas
investor, Col. Wimberly (William R. Moses), interested in buying part of the
ranch to build a golf course for $8 million — until one day, when Jayne
and Eduardo are returning home after dropping their kids off at school and
their SUV is surrounded on the road by four other cars.
Both of them are
kidnapped by four men wearing ski masks, and eventually she escapes — she’s
left in the back of a van with a hammer, symbol of a Mexican revolutionary
political group called the EPR, which tells the AFI agent (apparently those are
the real initials of the name of the Mexican national police, usually
colloquially known as the Federales) Raul (Nicholas Gonzalez, a hot, sexy and very intense performer who
out-acts the principals) that it’s a political kidnapping and they are unlikely
to kill the kidnap victim but that the ransom demand is likely to be high. (Over)directed by Eric
Bross from a teleplay by J. B. White, We Have Your Husband (a bit of a misnomer because by taking both
members of the couple, then releasing her, the kidnappers let it be known that
they have her husband without having to tell her so in so many words) is
nonetheless a pretty exciting movie even though I watched through most of it
expecting a reversal that either the local police or someone the couple knew
well (like Eduardo’s friend Gustavo Otero, played by Danny Mora) was in on the
crime and faked it to look like a political kidnapping — the kidnappers, whoever they were, had
clearly done a lot of research about the family, knowing (among other things)
about the $8 million deal for the golf course (which predictably falls through
during the course of the story — a kidnapping isn’t the greatest encouragement
for U.S. investors to sink a lot of money in a tourist-oriented project in a
Mexican town) and even where in the U.S. Eduardo and Jayne met 15 years earlier.
But no such plot
twist came, though there was an ironic situation in which director Bross
intercut between scenes of Eduardo being tortured (supposedly the kidnappers
cut off one of his ears — though when he’s finally released and comes home to
his family Esai Morales’s head looks normal, with the full complement of ears
nature and the gene pool gave him — and also shot him with a gun at point-blank
range in a way that wouldn’t hurt him but would scare the shit out of his wife
when she saw the video they e-mailed her) with shots of a police raid on an EPR
encampment where they were holding a kidnap victim — a different one, it turns out. There are some of the usual
problems with this movie — among them the predictable one that it takes place
in a dream vision of “Mexico” in which everyone speaks accented but
linguistically impeccable English — but in the end it’s one of those films in
which the basic story is so exciting it triumphs over ineptitudes in the
execution (and I’d also like to note for future reference the name of
Christopher Saavedra, who plays the Valsecas’ appealingly long-haired son
Diego) and though the final scene is pretty cornball — Eduardo, disheveled,
with a grey beard and wearing pants too big for him (I guess we’re supposed to
believe he lost that much weight in captivity), shows up back at the ranch the
night of Diego’s birthday party — the note just before the closing credits,
which says that the kidnappers have never been caught and the Valsecas have
never returned to the ranch they once loved so much, has the uncertainty of
real life about it rather than the neat loose-ends tying-up of a fiction story.
