TRAPPED
1/2
A taut kidnap thriller.
Running time: 99 minutes. Rated R (violence, language and sexual content.) At the E-Walk, Loews 34th St., Battery Park City, others.
CONTRARY to the conventional wisdom, which bodes ill for the quality of movies, that studios refuse to pre-screen for critics, the kidnap drama “Trapped” is not a dud.It’s a tightly drawn, propulsive thriller with some pleasingly unexpected kinks in the tale and a couple of believable performances from Charlize Theron and Kevin Bacon in the leads.
The reason Columbia Pictures imposed a media blackout on the film, and excised references from its advertising to the child abduction central to the plot, was out of what seems to be overly sensitive regard for the young victims of kidnappings and murders that have filled the headlines this summer.
Indeed, the movie begins with what could be considered disturbing scenes of the abduction from her Portland, Ore., home of Abby, a darling 6-year-old girl (Dakota Fanning, who looks remarkably like a very young Kate Hudson).
But it quickly morphs into a parent-empowerment film, with Theron, eyes beaming hatred, giving a fine imitation of the lioness whose cub is threatened.
Her Karen is the female equivalent of Mel Gibson’s anti-victim father in Ron Howard’s “Ransom,” although her anesthesiologist husband, as played one-dimensionally by the Irishman Stuart Townsend, comes off as an earnest, ineffectual wuss.
Based on “24 Hours,” the best-selling book by Greg Iles (who also wrote the screenplay), “Trapped” pits the wits of three kidnappers and their three hostages, in various locations, against each other over the space of 24 hours.
Joe Hickey (Bacon) and his wife, Cheryl (a strangely coifed Courtney Love falling out of her dress, as usual, in a caricatured gang moll role), have, along with Joe’s dim cousin Marvin (Pruitt Taylor Vince), perfected what they believe to be a foolproof crime.
It’s a well-oiled machine that runs on the fear of the parent for the safety of the child, and it’s gone off without a hitch four times previously.
But complications arise when, in a tried-and-true dramatic device, it transpires that Abby is severely asthmatic and if she doesn’t get her medication, she will die.
The sudden concern of the kidnappers for the child’s well-being doesn’t really jibe with the later revelation that this abduction is not motivated by greed – this time, it’s personal.
But there’s no time for incredulity as director Luis Mandoki (“Angel Eyes,” “Message in a Bottle”) ramps up the action in a breakneck run to the film’s explosive denouement, played out on a stretch of highway that magically becomes devoid of peripheral players once the pyrotechnics begin.
Despite some hiccups of logic, Mandoki keeps the mood taut and, with a scene in which Townsend and Love are trapped in a free-falling sea plane, creates a memorable cinematic moment.