Karla Dyson (Halle Berry) doesn't lead an easy life, that's for sure. Her job as a waiter at a diner has her interacting with unsavory customers all the live long day and working extended hours by covering for her more lazy co-workers. Luckily, she's got her son, Frankie (Sage Correra), who brings a lot of joy into her life, though she's in the middle of a custody battle with her ex-husband that could limit the amount of time she gets to see him. While attending a big outdoor festival event with Frankie, Karla is talking to that ex-husband on the phone when something truly awful happens...Frankie is kidnapped!
Yes, Karla see's her son being dragged into a car and immediately chases after her son. Now, Karla doesn't know who these people are. She doesn't know what they want. If they're looking for money, she can tell them she doesn't have any. But what she does have is a red minivan that she can chase these kidnappers in, a red mini-van that makes her a nightmare for people like the ones that have kidnapped her son. Now, if they let her son go now, that'll be the end of it. She will not look for them. She will not pursue them. But if they don't, she will look for them, she will find them.....and she will kill them.
As I subtly implied in the last paragraph, Kidnap is very much trying to hew close to the style of fellow vengeful parent thriller Taken. There are far worse movies to take heavy inspiration from and I've actually wondered, given how many knock-offs of Taken we've seen in the past eight years, why we haven't gotten a female-led version of that basic premise. We finally get one such film in Kidnap, which, unfortunately, isn't quite as much an intense thrill ride as it clearly wants to be. The primary reason for this is simple actually; the vast majority of the sequences that are supposed to be "pulse-pounding" are car chase scenes and these extended segments of the motion picture are quite poorly put together from a visual perspective.
Similar to how Taken had Liam Neeson hunting for his daughter by way of numerous elongated fight scenes, Kidnap has Halle Berry chasing her son through a succession of car chase scenes. Not a bad idea at all in concept, but the execution leaves so much to be desired. The individual car chases themselves get repetitive very quickly thanks to unimaginative camerawork and frequently disorienting editing. A moment depicting Halle Berry putting her car in reverse that uses movie trailer style editing suggests a more inventive and fun way to visually depict this character trying like crazy to get her son back, but for the most part, Kidnap settles for some tepid car chase scenes that feel particularly lackluster coming so closely after Baby Driver and its masterful car chases.
With so much of the screentime devoted to these lackluster car chases, there's just no chance for achieving the kind of thrills or cheesy fun Kidnap obviously wanted to obtain. At least Halle Berry is trying her darnest in the lead role while, in the supporting cast, Chris McGinn is decent as a female kidnapper who's a true blue stereotype that McGinn is at least committed to in her brief screentime. The positive attributes these two bring are a total anomaly in Kidnap, a film that should have been melodramatic cathartic fun instead of an overly repetitive snooze. Surely we can find Halle Berry something better to do than this?
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