Kidnapped in Paradise (The Steve Jaggi Company, Sepia Films, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

It’s been a rather quirky morning so far because Charles and I stayed up last night until 2 a.m. watching the Lifetime “premiere” movie Kidnapped in Paradise – apparently the original title was simply Kidnapped until someone at Lifetime or one of the production companies involved (Steve Jaggi Productions and Sepia Films) may have realized this would get it confused with Robert Louis Stevenson’s 19th century novel Kidnapped. Ironically, imdb.com lists another TV-movie called Kidnapped in Paradise from 1999, albeit with a totally different cast and plot line. The 2020 Kidnapped in Paradise takes place mostly in Australia, though after a prologue that doesn’t make much sense without the rest of the movie to explain it, it shifts to Los Angeles for a framing sequence in which the heroine, Samantha (Claire van der Boom – I chuckled at her last name but Charles assured me that it’s a quite normal-sounding name in the Netherlands, “Boom” simply being the Dutch variant of the German word “Baum,” meaning “tree”), announces to her husband Brad (Todd Lasance) and their daughter Aria (Molly Wright), who’s described as being five years old in the dialogue but looked more like seven or eight to me, have won a free vacation to the Koala Park nature preserve and resort in Australia. Samantha is eager to take her family on the trip because she was born in Australia and used to love that park before her parents moved to the U.S., where she grew up (which explains why Claire van der Boom doesn’t have a hint of an “Aussie” accent), and wants to share its beauties with her family.

Only, as if you couldn’t have guessed from the title, skulduggery is afoot. Though the first time Aria goes missing from her parents is perfectly innocent – she just wandered off to look for and find a seashell – the second time, when the parents have checked Aria into the “kidz’ club” (that’s how it’s spelled), a mad assemblage of toys that looks like the late Michael Jackson’s playroom at Neverland so the kids will have somewhere to hang out while the adults get some time to themselves, Aria isn’t there when Samantha and Brad show up to retrieve her. She’s also disturbed because the person who checked Aria into the Kidz’ Club in the first place was a woman on the resort staff named Jane (Melina Vidler) but the person staffing the desk who reports to her that Aria is missing is a rather scruffy-looking guy named Robert (James Hoare) who has an odd tattoo on his arm and, it turns out, is actually having a sexual affair with Jane even though the script by Shanra Wakefield tells us he’s “beneath her” class-wise. There’s also another couple on the resort Savannah and Brad befriend, Australians Nick (Jason Wilder) and Gabby (Lynn Gilmartin), who are staying there in hopes the place’s natural beauty will enable them to conceive their first child, which they haven’t been able to do under more prosaic circumstances. Writer Wakefield “plants” us a big hint when Samantha is accosted at the check-in desk by a fellow tourist who wants to take a picture of her and Jane together because he thinks they look so much alike (and a sentence in Lifetime’s synopsis rather gives away the plot), but for a while we’re led to suspect that Nick and Gabby have abducted Samantha’s and Brad’s daughter because they’re so desperate for a child of their own.

While our suspicions are aroused (pardon the pun) if only because James Wilder is the hottest guy in the movie and Lifetime’s usual iconography is that Sexy Guy = Villain, Wakefield rambles through a number of not particularly intersecting plot lines (including throwing a certain amount of suspicion on the boat captain whose craft provides the only way either people or supplies can get on or off the island resort), it doesn’t take long for either the cops on the scene, Sergeant Rhodes (Marshall Betzel), an avuncular middle-aged white guy. and Constable Lewis (Ngoc Pham), a young woman dressed in a skin-tight uniform and someone who, despite the actress’s name, doesn’t look particularly Asian, or the audience to settle on Jane and Robert as the kidnappers. Robert arouses suspicion because Samantha notices a red gang tattoo on his forearm and later learns it’s the mark of a group of drug smugglers and human traffickers (which arouses our own morbid suspicions of what they plan to do with Aria!), but he insists he no longer has anything to do with the gang and the cops find no reason not to believe him. It turns out Jane is the real mastermind behind the crime. Her motive is that she is actually Samantha’s half-sister – their dad had an affair with Jane’s mom before he married Samantha’s mom and emigrated to the United States – and Jane went through a virtually absent mother and a lot of crappy foster-home placements. Determined to destroy Samantha’s family the way their dad destroyed hers, Jane not only kidnaped Aria but threatened to kill her, though in the tradition of quite a few Lifetime villainesses what she really wanted was not only to kill Samantha but to take over as Aria’s mom. (Of course, as a big opera fan, I joked that Aria would have a brother named Duet and a sister named Scena!)

The finale occurs on the dock where that all-important boat ties up and Jane is determined to steal it, use it to get herself and Aria off the island and raise Aria herself as “Aunt Jane” (which of course she literally is!). Only Samantha figures out the scheme and climbs over the fence blocking her from the boat – Jane had talked someone into giving her the key to the gate and then locked it behind her – and makes a spectacular leap onto the deck to confront Jane. It’s not much of a confrontation at first because Jane has a gun – “Why are you holding a gun on Mommy?” Aria asks, understandably – and she threatens to shoot Samantha even though she insists all she wants to do with her half-sister is make her suffer, not kill her. Eventually the cops come and arrest Jane – though both the woman inspector and Samantha’s husband Brad (ya remember Brad?) earlier got knocked out and severely injured by Jane’s penchant for dispatching the innocent with blunt instruments – and in a surprising finish for a Lifetime movie, instead of hating Jane’s guts Samantha pledges to remain in her life and try to find her the “help” she needs to get over the mental issues that led her to kidnap Aria and nearly kill Samantha herself That “Therapy Overcomes All” ending rubbed me the wrong way, but overall Kidnapped in Paradise was a good, if not great, Lifetime movie. The director, Vic Sarin, is someone whose named I’ve ridiculed on some of his previous credits (“It’s directed by a poisonous gas!”), but he actually turns in a good job of creating and building suspense. He’s also particularly interested in contrasting the horror of the events taking place with the sheer overwhelming natural beauty of the countryside they’re taking place in – though back in 1925 directors King Vidor and George Hill did an even better job of that in their World War I film The Big Parade and, if anything, Sarin and his cinematographer, Simon Harding, are too much in love with the sheer beauty of their location. Edit out the kidnapping and all the suspicious behavior, and this footage could be used for promotional films about the place!