By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Luis Prieto
Cast: Halle Berry, Sage Correa, Chris McGinn, Lew Temple, Jason George, Christopher Berry, Arron Shiver and Kurtis Bedford.
Rating: Poor.
Academy Award Winner Halle Berry teams up with director Luis Prieto in “Kidnap” a thriller that could have looked much better if more time would have been invested in the project.
The movie tells the story of Karla Dyson (Halle Berry) a divorced mother and waitress who one day takes his son Frankie to the park.
During that time while they are playing Hide and Seek, Frankie apparently gets lost and Karla is looking for him.
Suddenly she see´s two kidnappers abducting his son. Now Karla will be in a game of cat and mouse with both kidnappers and she will not stop at anything to get her son back, even if it means tu put her life at risk.
Like I mentioned before “Kidnap” was an interesting idea but the execution was handled in a poor matter.
The screenplay written by Knate Lee had a lot of gaps to be filled and this is one of the major problems that I saw in the film.
There is the conflict of where we see Karla as a divorced mother who tries everything to please her kid and does it very well. But I would have liked to see more than that, a real suffering before the real kidnap happens.
The directing by Luis Prieto was all over the place and I feel that the technical choices that he made were not handled properly.
Halle Berry is a pleasure always seeing her in screen but I was not sure this time about her performance in this film. In fact she had many "Oh My God" moments in the movie, sentence that she used multiple times.
We have seen a lot of movies that involve kidnapping like “Breakdown” starring Kurt Russell and “Taken” with Liam Neeson that with all do respect are way to much better movies than “Kidnap”. The main reason is because there was not invested in story and the tensions built in those movies.
The editing of this film is one of the worst I have seen and for a movie like this one, the editing is crucial.
When I was watching the film and from the opening image that it was when Frankie I said to myself: Oh No. This one of the most cliché moments and it was.
The beginning was pointless and there were other ways to illustrate this in the film.
There were moments that I was having a good time I´m not going to lie but the movie is a complete mess.
I remember watching the trailer since November of last year and it was scheduled for last December but it got pushed back until now. When there is a problem like that in a delay of a film there are problems and I was not wrong this time.
The movie had a lot of potential and I feel that if more time would have been invested in the script and filming we would have seen a different movie.
“Kidnap” is one of the year´s worst films and I cannot give a recommendation to this film.