Kidnapping Mr Heineken ** (2015, Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington, Anthony Hopkins, Ryan Kwanten) – Movie Review

Freddy Heineken: ‘There is two ways a man can be rich in this world. He can have a lot of money or he can have a lot of friends. But he cannot have both.’

Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington and Ryan Kwanten lead the cast as a bunch of cash-strapped Dutch lads who decide to kidnap beer magnate Freddy Heineken (Anthony Hopkins) for the largest ransom ever paid.

There’s a good cast and an excellent chase sequence to help to liven up a rather flat and bland TV movie style true-life crime drama re-creating events in 1983 Amsterdam. The story might have been more interesting seen from the victim’s point of view rather than that of the anti-heroes. The inside story is a good idea but it does lead sympathy to stray from the victim to the perpetrators, who turn out to be real bad guys.

Amsterdam provides an intriguing backdrop but none of the actors manages any sense of being Dutch. Heck, several of them sound Australian.

At any rate, the story of the inside story of the planning, execution and aftermath of a kidnapping should be much more rousing than this. Swedish film-maker Daniel Alfredson (The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) directs plainly and anonymously. But it is short, fast-paced and watchable enough.

Sam Worthington’s character of Willem Holleeder went on to become a kingpin in the Dutch underworld. The green Heineken bottles are not correct for the early 80s when  the beer was sold only in brown bottles in the Netherlands. Co-writer Peter R de Vries did not attend the movie premiere as he feels the movie is too different from the actual kidnapping.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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