Movie Review: Kidnap

Halle Berry has been on an astonishing losing streak at the box office since she won the Academy Award for her starring role in Monster’s Ball. Ever since the night she won people’s hearts with her teary and historic Oscar acceptance speech, Berry has made one wrong turn after another whether making bad big budget comic book movies, all X-Men sequels or spinoffs, or bad low budget thrillers, Perfect Stranger, Gothika, The Call, or head-scratching, defiantly awful fare such as Movie 43, Cloud Atlas and Catwoman, Berry seemed bent on full career sabotage.

This brings us to Kidnap which by default, Things We Lost in the Fire wasn’t bad, may be the best movie Berry has made in well over a decade. The story of a mother attempting to retrieve her stolen child, Kidnap may be a super low budget, cheapie thriller, but Berry gives the role all she’s got, even if she is occasionally out shined by her magical car-chase minivan.

In Kidnap Berry portrays Karla Dyson, a waitress who somehow can afford a brand-new Ford minivan on a salary of tips and minimum wage. Karla is amid a divorce and a custody battle when she takes her son Frankie (Sage Correa) to a carnival at a local park. When her divorce attorney calls, Karla takes her eye off her son for a moment and doesn’t see him again until she spies a large woman wrestling the boy into a beat up old Mustang.

After attempting to wrestle the Mustang to a stop with her momma bear determination, Karla loads into her minivan to give chase and Kidnap becomes an almost non-stop car chase thriller. I will say this for director Luis Prieto, he keeps up a quick pace. Kidnap comes and goes in just over 80 minutes and there is very little fat on the narrative. The film’s camera work and editing can be a tad too chaotic but that’s likely a function of the setting, a New Orleans highway system, and the film’s very tight budget.

I admire the way Halle Berry plays Karla in Kidnap. While she has a few moments of going over the top, talking to herself out loud just to make sure the audience keeps paying attention, but otherwise she is the picture of motherly determination. The narrative is good and tight with Karla’s motivations very clear and while some of the action stretches credulity, just how durable and fast is that minivan or that crappy Mustang you might wonder, but Berry grounds the movie in a believable level of determination.

I am tempted to point out some of the silliness of Kidnap, the predictability of the plot, the supporting baddies who are written off as poor dumb rednecks, the unnecessary details about Karla’s divorce and custody battle, the super-unhelpful cops and bystanders, but the film is far too short and to the point for me to spend too much time picking at it. Kidnap is far from perfect but as a minimalist, low budget thriller it works well enough and will make for a fun ride for the few who shell out for tickets and an even more economic bit of time-wasting on Netflix in a few months.