Source: Common Sense Media
Kidnap has a simple plot. Mother loves son; son is kidnapped; mother stops at nothing to find son. The premise is equally simple: this mother is one tough cookie and shouldn’t be messed with.
The story is set up for the viewer right at the beginning. Karla Dyson (the beautiful Halle Berry) is a struggling waitress who works in a useless restaurant with awful customers. Her son – Frankie (Sage Correa) – is her life. Her ex-husband wants custody of the boy. So when Frankie is inexplicably taken from a funfair (where Karla just sees him being bundled into a car) she has nothing but her son to lose.
The rest of the film makes room for Karla’s development. As Karla becomes more exasperated with the kidnappers – and the authorities – she grows even more determined and resilient. Several external factors make her job harder: she loses her phone, she runs out of petrol on this (very) long drive, and she tries to trade her purse for the boy. What doesn’t seem to get in her way, however, are the public in general and any physical injuries. At certain points cars are spaced evenly so that the baddies and their pursuer can easily dodge in and out. And despite several horrendous crashes Karla surfaces each time to continue her pursuit.
What Karla eventually finds is something part of a much bigger issue which does lend more purpose to this car chase. The final scenes are quite nail-biting too. But on the whole Kidnap is too formulaic and superficial to be much more than a showcase for how tough and capable this modern woman is.
Kidnap opens at cinemas in South Africa on 8 December 2017. It carries an age restriction of 13V. #FridayFun
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