If you’ve ever seen the film Taken and thought: this is cool and all, but I wish Liam Neeson was a soccer mom. Or, if you’ve ever seen Tom Hardy in Locke and thought: I like movies about people driving, but couldn’t there also be a child’s life at stake? Well, stop yer yammering, I’ve got something really exciting for you. Mind you, Kidnap is only exciting for those very specific individuals who put their hands up earlier. For everyone else, this is a generic movie at best.
Halle Berry plays the soccer mom who takes her eyes off her son for just one itty bitty minute and POOF! – he disappears. Only his kidnappers are just barely proficient so Halle Berry actually sees her son being stuffed into the back of a stranger’s car, and like 
any angry mama bear she takes off on a parking lot tear, totally prepared to outrun the car if only she can, but of course she can’t. So she hops behind the wheel of her trusty mini van and the world’s slowest, most meandering, and good lord most repetitive chase begins.
Halle Berry doesn’t have her cell phone so her only means of contacting the outside world for help is to drive erratically and hope that a cop will notice that something’s amiss. She’s pretty sure that every other missing child just wasn’t loved enough by his or her parents so she’s going to break the mold by putting the law into her own hands, which are white-knuckled on the steering wheel for a good 80% of the movie.
Halle Berry is good, even when she’s spouting cringe-worthy lines from a tired, uninterested script, she’s nothing short of panicky, breathless, desperate. Her character goes through quite an ordeal as you can imagine, but the film’s 84 minutes feel like an ordeal for the audience as well. We must endure hardships together. But since you have a choice, let me help you make the informed decision: Kidnap is derivative, predictable, and horribly cliched. The only positive thing I have to say is I was grateful not to find the story encumbered by secondary roles, subplots, or a character development. The movie stays true to its one-word title. And then they beat you over the head with it.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 
Why is this not surprising to me? 💩💩💩
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I’ve always wanted a 90 minute car chase film featuring a mini-van.
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Lol I liked Taken, but I’ve never evinced a desire to see a version of it with a soccer mom instead of Liam Neeson.
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Heh, heh, heh … great review! 😀 … I’ll pass on this one. 🙂
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Hah great review, one for the pass-me-by list!
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Exactly as I feared. Sadly, I’m still going to see this because Mrs. Dell is enamored by the trailer.
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Well it’s watchable because of Halle. Predictable of course, but she’s great.
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The film felt like one long Chrysler Town and Country commercial. Funny that it barely got any damage.
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Yeah, and she had like 7 different accidents but it just kept going. And she barely had a scratch on her either.
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I wasn’t interested before. Now I’m certainly not. Thanks for the heads up.
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I imagine it being a fairly predictable flick. Hallie is too good for this movie!
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Eh? No phone on her? What’s the deal with that? What about her son? Surely he has one? Sounds completely unrealistic to me (unless it’s set in the 20s or something).
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She dropped it in the parking lot!
And it was low battery!
And her phone card was about to expire!
And her fingers were too swollen to dial!
Okay, I made some of those up.
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Haha!
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Seems like a safe pass.
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It’s very frustrating to me that Halle Berry’s acting talent and her ability to pick decent projects are inversely proportional.
Maybe it’s not her, though. Maybe she has to take what she can get. Or maybe she picks amazing scripts that get rewritten into total suckfests once production starts. That happens a lot in Hollyweird.
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She definitely deserves better.
She acted as a producer on this one though, so she was behind it 100%.
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This has to be the dumbest movie I’ve seen in quite some time. I wanted to scream at HB so many times for being so stupid. The kidnappers were probably the worst kidnappers in the world. An international ring? C’mon! The amount of luck she had when finding the kidnappers time and time again was just … terribly unreal. To me, it felt that the movie should have been over after half an hour. HB’s scared face looked a bit like a crazy/ mentally insane person on a lot of meds. This was supposed to be a feminist movie, I bet. HB, while chasing the kidnapper says something about the male not knowing what to do next, because the female pulls the strings. Ummm… and she deduced this from??? I enjoy seeing strong women, but don’t be pushing your agenda THAT hard.
I decided to watch this movie, because I saw nothing but stellar viewer’s reviews on a certain site. Oh, how I wish I red your review earlier!
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