by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Lifetime presentation was of a film called Kidnap, and they ballyhooed the presence of Halle Berry as
star so relentlessly I had got the idea that Kidnap Starring Halle
Berry was actually the film’s title. I had
also assumed the movie was made for Lifetime, but it was a wanna-be theatrical
release from a company called Relativity Media which raised money from
investors by claiming they had a mathematical formula that would ensure
long-term success and a steady stream of profits from an industry as inherently
chancy as filmmaking. Alas, after a series of commercial bombs they were forced
to declare bankruptcy in 2017 and the remaining films in their pipeline were
sold to other studios. Kidnap is
prefaced by the usual plethora of production company credits — Di Bonaventura
Pictures, Gold Star Films, 606 Films — and casts Halle Berry as Louisiana
resident Karla Dyson, who’s just gone through a divorce and is fighting her
ex-husband for custody of their young son (he’s supposed to be 6 but looks more
like 8 or 9) Frankie (Sage Correa) even though Frankie’s dad and dad’s new
girlfriend both have professional jobs while Karla is barely scraping by as a
waitress. In the opening scene she’s shown on the job getting into an argument
with a couple of parents and their heavily spoiled young son about just what
they will order, and Karla can’t help but mutter an insult to them even though
that sort of thing could get her fired. Then she takes Frankie to a playground,
only in the middle of their outing she has to take a phone call, she turns away
from him, and when she turns back he’s gone.
Karla gets a glimpse of him being
grabbed by a shadowy figure and pulled into a 1980’s Ford Mustang GT of
indeterminate color — it’s described in the script as green but it looked teal
blue to me — and she doesn’t get its license-plate number because it doesn’t
appear to have one. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling the police
on her cell phone, Karla decides to chase the Mustang on foot and actually
grabs on to it, though of course nothing she does can stop the car (hey, Halle,
when you made a DC Comics Universe movie you were Catwoman, not Wonder Woman!), so she gets into her own car, a red
Chrysler Town Car SUV that has a hard time keeping up with the Mustang even
though, as some imdb.com posters pointed out, the two are about equal
performance-wise and her car is newer and therefore presumably faster. (Charles
also questioned whether a woman working as a waitress could afford such a
high-end car, but maybe she bought it during her marriage and got title to it
after the divorce.) From then on the film becomes a long series of car chases
that reminded Charles of The French Connection and The Blues Brothers, as the antagonists end up causing accidents that
include the flipping-over of another SUV, the near-death of a woman pedestrian
who happens to get in their way, and the crushing to (apparent) death of a
motorcycle cop who tries to get Karla to pull over and ends up being squeezed
between her car and the Mustang. Karla finally reports the kidnapping of her son at a sheriff’s
office and the bored Black deputy working the reception desk puts out an Amber
Alert for the green, blue, teal or whatever-color-it-is Mustang — only in the
meantime it’s been put out of commission after Karla ran it off the road and
the kidnappers have stolen a black Volvo SUV to continue the chase.
Also Karla
has actually met the kidnappers, a scrawny white guy named Terrence Tichy (Lew
Temple) and his wife, a huge woman named Margo (Chris McGinn, who was in The
Silence of the Lambs and has a surprisingly
long credits list on imdb.com — one would think she’d be difficult to cast
because of her enormous size, but she’s managed to keep working for almost
three decades). Margo tells Karla that Terrence just wanted to kill her son
Frankie, but Margo can persuade him to let Frankie go alive if Karla can come
up with a $10,000 ransom. At one point Margo insists on getting into Karla’s
car, where she sits in the back seat but then in the middle of the ride — which
they’re presumably taking so Karla can drain her bank accounts and max out her
credit cards to pay the ransom — Margo insists on grabbing the controls, giving
new meaning to the phrase “back-seat driver,” until Karla manages to throw her
out of the car and strand her. Then, after Karla has pushed the Mustang off the
road but has run out of gas herself, she gets shot at by Terrence with a
shotgun and a truck driver she was asking to help her gets blown away. At the
police station where she reports a crime she sees a whole wall full of wanted
posters for missing children — in one of the few genuinely poignant moments of
the movie — and her heart sinks. One thing she has been able to do from the wreckage of the kidnappers’
Mustang is retrieve their I.D.’s, which tell her not only their names but also
their address — and Karla ends up going there to find her son, only to play a
cat-and-mouse game with the woman kidnapper (Karla had managed to kill Terrence
with his own shotgun, but his wife doesn’t yet know he’s dead), calling on the
Tichys’ cordless phone to the police. She finds her son but also two other
kidnapped children, both girls, only she has to flee in a hurry when Margo
retrieves her husband’s shotgun and sets a tracking dog on her to find where
she and Frankie are hiding — only Margo accidentally kills the dog with the
shotgun and Karla is able to kill Margo.
Then Karla attempts to free the other
captives — only she’s set upon by another guy with a shotgun, the Tichys’ neighbor, who at first insists he’s
known them for years and they would never do anything like that, then seems to switch sides and help rescue the
kids still being held captive in the Tichy’s attic, only Karla realizes that he
knows something she’s never told him — that there are two captives and they’re
both girls — so she realizes he’s part of the human-trafficking ring that’s
behind all this and was offering $100,000 for Frankie. Karla kills Frankie by
walloping him with a shovel, the police finally arrive and rescue everybody, and we see a newscaster
announcing that Karla’s brave actions have led to arrests of members of a
widespread human-trafficking ring over several states. Kidnap is a genuinely exciting thriller — writer Knate Lee
and director Luis Prieto knew exactly what they wanted to do to their audience, and did it — though there
are an awful lot of plot holes and we’re all too aware of them even as we’re
being swung like one of those tethered amusement-park balls from one thrill to
the next. Halle Berry is effective in what’s basically a one-woman show, but
the role doesn’t require her to do much but show an adrenaline-fueled panic and
a single-minded determination to find and rescue her son no matter how much
collateral damage she inflicts in the pursuit. One can see why this wasn’t a
big theatrical hit, and if this is the sort of movie Relativity Media thought
was sure-fire box-office gold it’s not surprising they went bankrupt, but Kidnap is at least a movie that accomplishes what it set
out to do even though one could imagine a far richer, greater film being made
of the same basic situation.
