Snatched * (2017, Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Ike Barinholtz, Wanda Sykes, Joan Cusack) – Movie Review

Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn try their best, they really do, as Emily Middleton and her ultra-cautious mother Linda who set off on an exotic vacation to paradise together when Em is dumped by her boyfriend and none of her girlfriends will go.

The Paradise that is Ecuador soon turns to hell, of course, when the innocents abroad are targeted and snatched by the locals, kidnapped for ransom by drug lords, just as Linda predicted.

The film is advertised as unpredictable, hilarious and wildly outrageous, but the last of these turns out to be the only true one. By far the largest part of the audience when I saw it were women, and, to be fair, they were laughing quite a lot, mostly at anything silly, slapstick or gross-out, which, come to think of it, is most of the movie.

In a horrible role so it’s not his fault, Ike Barinholtz is awful as Linda’s rancid middle-aged, mother loving son Jeffrey, while Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack are ghastly trying to raise untruthful laughs as inane security folk Ruth and Barb.

It is Schumer’s first movie since the hilarious Trainwreck, so it’s a big fat let-down after that. Schumer tries everything to get laughs – perhaps tries too hard – but she is stranded by Katie Dippold’s unfunny, often painful and desperate script, peppered with useless gags, mostly one-note drink and sex oriented. There’s a weird anti-men and anti-foreigner thing going on in the comedy that is pretty unattractive.

The real-life based abduction story, when it kicks in, is awkward to say the least, lying as a strange bedfellow with Schumer’s usual schtick. And the mother-daughter bonding, when it finally and inevitably comes, is lame and shameless.

Hawn hasn’t done a movie in 15 years since The Banger Sisters (2001). I’m not saying that she has lost her comic touch but she has lost her edge and got a bit rusty. It might have looked good on paper, but this is not a good vehicle for her comeback.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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