Snatched Has Some Funny Moments But It's Too Heavily Scattered To Work Fully

Family vacations always seem to detour into unexpected misadventures and detours and all kinds of other problems in the real world, but in the movies, I don't think there's such a thing as a drama-free vacation. Whether it's the Griswalds going on their Family Vacation or European Vacation or those Millers posing as a clean-cut family to get down to Mexico or Robin Williams and his family in the 2006 family film RV, cinematic depictions of family vacations just seem destined to go awry. Snatched, a new Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn comedy, very much continues this pattern of family getaways very much not going according to plan.

The two family members going on a big international trip in this case are Emily Middleton (Amy Schumer) and Linda Middleton (Goldie Hawn). Emily is going nowhere in life while Linda, her mom, is so paranoid and afraid of the outside world she can barely leave her house. How do these two manage to get stuck on a trip to Ecuador together? Well, Emily planned a non-refundable trip to that locale with her boyfriend....who just broke up with her. So now it's her and Linda in a tropical paradise where Emily happens to run into a hunky native whom she becomes infatuated with, to the point that she eagerly joins in on his invitation to check out some nearby scenic hotspots.

Linda is forced to come along for the adventure...which quickly takes a sinister detour as it turns out Emily's new object of affection is in cahoots with some local gangsters that he's been planning to turn the two ladies over to the entire time. Trapped in a foreign country with no one to help them and with numerous gun-toting baddies on their trail, Emily and Linda are gonna have to work together to get home in one piece, a task made difficult by the fractured relationship the two share that will be put to the test (and perhaps, just maybe, even strengthened) by their various escapades in trying to evade their captors.

That mother/daughter bonding thing the two engage on while on their trip turns out to be a core element of the entire movie, which makes it odd that Katie Dippold's screenplay basically erases that entire subplot for an extended period of the film before sloppily bringing it back at the start of the third act. Snatched has actually been moving along at a reasonably decent pace up to this point too so to have the movie abruptly remember the mother/daughter relationship storyline that was so important in the initial scenes and try to bring that back just makes the final third of Snatched more awkward than heartwarming.

Dippold's writing similarly has a problem with handling the locale the two lead characters are trapped in, with the area and its inhabitants getting uncomfortable at best treatment in the story at best. Having two white American women only encounter native Ecuadorians and Colombians (the two eventually find themselves in Colombia) who are either criminals or simply overly simplified caricatures just left a nasty taste in my mouth, it robs moments of potential comedy when there's these weird racial politics found in the shallow way Snatched handles depicting these two South American countries and their respective people that are constantly seeping into the frame. It's a shame such uncomfortable material keeps cropping up because it ends up distracting from some good laughs that can be found in Snatched.

For instance, Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn (the latter of whom really is a delight bouncing off the intense circumstances she finds herself in) have fun chemistry together in their antics and in terms of Schumer's performance, I like how Schumer gives her character a more self-centered personality without going too over-the-top with it, Emily manages to register firmly as a real individual we can root for. Meanwhile, Ike Barinhotlz in a supporting capacity steals the show as Emily's geeky brother who's too awkward to handle the most basic tasks. Director Johnathan Levine (whose films 50/50 and Warm Bodies suggest he has some real talent as a filmmaker), meanwhile, gives the film more thoughtful direction than you'll find in average American comedies (he's no Dennis Dugan, that's for sure). Levine and the cast give Snatched a breezy vibe with some alright laughs that get weighed down heavily by some major script issues that the rest of the movie fails to getaway from.