Ecuador

The film was disheartening. It had a captivating plot and a strong cast, however, it was poorly produced and its genre remained undefined throughout. The movie started on a low note, and there was only room for improvement, or so it seemed. To my astonishment, Goldie Hawn starred in this film, after taking a break from acting for over a decade. This movie could have been revitalized with her peerless talent, but to my dismay, it couldn’t. Today, I will dissect the film alongside my verdict of what worked and what did not, while one of them is probably going to be rather finite in length.

To give you an idea of what’s going on this is how Emily Middleton (Amy Schumer) is introduced in the movie. She is in her 20s, doesn’t know what to do with her life, she has just been fired, and her boyfriend (Randall Park) has broken up with her all this right before a chance buy her a non refundable vacation to Ecuador. After all of her friends click the ‘cancel’ button she decides to ask her mother for help, Linda (Goldie Hawn) who was caring elder but currently is immensely lonely with a bunch of her cats and her son Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz) who is an agoraphobic man. As the story goes on they end up in Eduardo and meet ‘platonic friends’ Ruth (Wanda Sykes) and Barb (Joan Cusack). Emily meets James (Tom Bateman) who is extremely creepy and dodgy, and to end the cliché, there are shocking twists involved including kidnapping.

The big issue with this movie is neither Joan Cusack first alongside Wanda Sykes and Amy Schumer, the true tragedy lies within the over arching plot and writing. I wouldn’t even go as far to say the cinematography was poor, I will say it was rather mediocre with a lot of promise. Schumer’s comedic prowess is rather lackluster at the start with her cast being able to portray the role in a much better way, which then leads to the film feeling bland as a whole. One of the main problems I would say I had with this movie is the fact that the actors, great as they may be, had little to no room to express themselves as Goldie Hawn, Joan and Wanda would outshine them. The locations seemed overly too stunning for the mere idea and concept of the movie but they provided a great deal of immersion regardless.

Well, there are a few issues that we’ve begun to address, but the real challenge is trying to understand the boundaries Snatched is trying to work around. The first challenge as the catch is that it has no idea what film it wants to be and in tone/story/structure, this is an American PG-13 and I am quite sure that a week out from shooting some executive decision was made in which everyone was told nope, you’re going to be R instead. .It follows the pattern of a traditional PG-13 movie, where there are a pair of characters that do not really resemble each other but are good friends, and then something big happens which forces the two to cooperate, at some point they would wash their dirty linen to some idiots people and then they will fix their problems and try to get out. It would have been easy to push this off as simply a PG-13 which would have not been great but still better than what was done. The movie does so simplistic plots that it is hard to imagine how they could push it above R, unlike Deadpool, it is being used purely to make that nip-slip gag.

Also, the beginning of the movie contains this narration card, ‘the pair went on a rampage throughout South America’, and oh ‘and the bad doers of the kidnapping also were bad.’ So when the first act of the film is in fact just quite bland, you just tell yourself, its ok, they are just preparing you for the contrast so that when they get caught and run away and things go off the chain you have something to align it to. No, they don’t ‘go of the chain’ they moan and whine from Ecuador to Columbia, with perhaps the better part of the last part of the third act being mildly interesting. but for the most part, those action scenes are really pretty subdued, like X-men 1 and Logan kind of subdued. Honestly, this is a great ‘fish out of water’ setup for the film, however they completely squander it. Indeed they cannot even make up their mind on what kind of movie they want this to be because the tone shifts from slapstick to what can be a deep analysis of the impact of the tourism in the developing countries but instead turns out to be just a cheap line in the film.

Another major problem is the characters around them, who are terrible humans or playing stereotypes that are extremely one-dimensional and distasteful. There is Emily who epitomizes a lost millennial or Michelle’s character, the cat lady divorced Linda, then again Jeffrey played the nerdish character but hold on guys it’s not the late 80’s Howard the Duck era, Morgado played the Latino mobster Óscar Jaenada such a type case, Ruth and Barb who are well again don’t ask because I don’t know what they are doing odd is the word i would use for it to say the least. Frankly they were so awful that I didn’t care at all if they learned to work together or not at the end.

All in all, I don’t really understand what Mr Gormley envisioned with Snatched and why he even chose to include these high profile actors, what I do know however is that the last film starring Goldie Hawn was released on the big screen in 2002 and I did not expect her to pick it up from the trash bin. It is a movie that is all over the place and lacking in commitment due to its overused stereotypes and predictable plotlines, and honestly it was less than an hour and a half in the movie until I heard something that vaguely sometimes sounds like a laugh so I wouldn’t waste my time on it, and don’t make your mothers happy with it on Mother’s Day.

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