Amy Schumer Goldie Hawn Wanda Sykes Joan Cusack Ike Barinholtz Christopher Meloni
The general audience is likely to get a big
kick out of Amy Schumer’s new movie, although it is already being criticized
for being racist, just based on the previews, and its damaging the travel
business in South America by implying that it’s dangerous to go there. I’m not a big fan of Schumer’s movies
or TV shows, except for Trainwreck,
but the same themes pretty much carry through all her work: Playing up sexy and
trying for laughs from drunkenness, being cheeky, and shocking
pronouncements. Many people enjoy
that kind of humor, but it leaves me neutral or even cold (as in the case of
alcohol). There were only about
four incidents in Snatched that made
me laugh. One was a shot of
Linda’s (Hawn) sculpture of a cat.
Another was when Ruth (Sykes, a gifted comedienne) is warning Emily
(Schumer) about traveling in South America with her mother. Ruth doesn’t believe it’s safe to walk
anywhere outside the resort, and cites a statistic that one in four tourists is
kidnapped, saying, “See, one, two, three (Ruth, Emily, Linda); someone’s
missing!” Still another was Amy
doing a somersault to knock down a really bad guy who deserved it. This slapstick kind of humor can make
me laugh, but like many jokes on TV and in movies, they’re repeated not just
once, not twice, but three times.
The fourth good-comedy moment was when watching
the Meloni character, Roger, a “tour guide”, leading the two kidnapped women
out of the Amazon Jungle. These
scenes are some of the best written in
Snatched by Katie Dippold. He
is a three-dimensional character created by Dippold, and Meloni makes him come
to life with subtlety and comedic timing.
I can also say that Cusack’s character of an ex-special ops agent who
never speaks a word, is stunning in her actions—some acrobatic.
As you could see from the preview of this
movie, Emily is dumped by her musician boyfriend after booking a vacation in
Ecuador with him. None of her
friends can go with her, and since she has a nonrefundable ticket, she’s so
desperate she insists that her phobic mother (Hawn as Linda) go with her,
arguing that it will do Linda good.
Emily throws caution to the winds when a handsome man (Bateman) flirts
with her in a bar and she spends a drunken (of course!) evening with him,
heedless of any cautionary information she’s been given.
Soon after, Emily and Linda get kidnapped while
touring outside the resort. Even
worse, Colombian cartel men become involved, making it even more
dangerous. Schumer and Hawn put
their dramatic and comedic skills into these scenes, and they are good; it’s
just that the material they’re working from is formulaic for this genre. It’s often over the top and just plain
silly.
Music by Chris Bacon and Theodore Shapiro and
cinematography by Florian Ballhaus enhance the beauty and cultural richness of
the production, directed well by Jonathan Levine.
A movie that, despite its humor, alarms
the South American tour industry.
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