Kidnap

Karla Dyson (Halle Berry) is a stressed out waitress in New Orleans. Her son Frankie is everything to her. Her husband is fighting for primary custody of him. At a park, Frankie is kidnapped with Karla following in hot pursuit.

Halle Berry seems to have fallen into a lot of these minor thrillers. The first half has some good thrills. This is essentially one long car chase concluding in a fight to the death. There are a few too many convenient twists which erodes the believeability of the movie. At one point, she is following the kidnappers surreptitiously and I figured that's good way to follow them to their hideout. Instead, it keeps trying to elevate the intensity by having unrealistic turns. The movie slowly falls apart but it keeps trying and that's somewhat watchable.

Well... I will first give credit where credit is due. I will admit that despite the many flaws to be found, I was never bored once during my viewing experience. And I will also admit that Halle Berry gives it her all, and certainly deserves an "A" for her great effort. Unfortunately, Berry is often required to spout dialogue (when no one else is around) that feels quite contrived and makes you think that the filmmakers thought the audience would be too stupid to figure out what her character was thinking and feeling if she was silent. A bigger problem is that there many moments where her character does some really stupid things that just extend the situation instead of finishing things much sooner had her character had some basic smartness. For that matter, the bad guys (and also some other characters) do their part to act stupid enough so that they stretch out the narrative as well. Had the movie's characters been of reasonable intelligence, we might possibly have had something here. But as it is, the movie is not that much better than silently watching a blank wall for 95 minutes.

Let's start with the good points; the premise is fine, and the initial scenes are well done. Halle Berry delivers a solid performance throughout, which essentially saves the movie. However, the writing is terrible. Frustratingly, infuriatingly lazy writing. The movie contains so many situations where you find yourself shouting at the screen "What??? Why didn't you...(insert sensible course of action)". The answer is, of course, that if her character did that, the movie would be over in the next 5 minutes. My particular favourite was her inexplicably abandoning the shotgun while in the kidnappers house. There is some entertainment to be had here, but you may come away just feeling annoyed at the sheer stupidity on display.

I wouldn't put this in the thriller category, I'd put in more in the fantasy line, as you genuinely so need to forget all sense of reality.

The pluses definitely outweigh the negatives, the main body of the film is somewhat thrilling, the car chase and kidnap scenes will have you on tenterhooks.

However it is dogged by several issues, the main one being the lack of any police, if it had been set in the 1950's I could understand, but in the days of CCTV, I struggle to understand how any of the events were even remotely possible. The opening credits went on for way too long, and throughout you will continually say to yourself, that would never happen.

Halle Berry is good, she's been dogged by some poor films, but she's never stopped being a very good actress.

If you can overlook its many flaws, you'll enjoy it.

I love action movies without aliens and superheroes so I was exited to see this movie where Halle Berry goes all out in her attempts to safe her kid.

The base of the story isn't that bad but oh how I hate it when writers can't come up with logical behavior even in high pressure situations.

With a little bit more creativity this actually could have been a very decent movie, but they took the easy way and at times it just was annoying how the story developed.

So a big disappointment.