Snatched is an incoherent let-down
SNATCHED is the first movie Goldie Hawn has appeared in 15 years and Amy Schumer’s follow-up to Trainwreck. So, it’s a double disappointment.
THERE were two huge sets of expectations going into Snatched.
The first is that it’s Amy Schumer’s follow-up to the surprise hit Trainwreck, though she didn’t write Snatched — that honour goes to Katie Dippold, who penned The Heat and co-wrote the Ghostbusters remake with Paul Feig.
The second is that it’s Goldie Hawn’s first role in 15 years since 2002’s The Banger Sisters.
What a disappointment on both counts.
In her defence, Hawn is wonderful. She’s still every bit the screen goddess but it’s a shame she was saddled with such an inconsistent movie as her comeback vehicle.
Emily (Schumer) is a self-involved thirty-something Instagram slave who was fired from her retail job and dumped by her muso boyfriend on the same day. The break-up leaves her with a non-refundable holiday to a resort in Ecuador.
Her mum Linda is a safety-obsessed paranoid with three deadlocks on her front door and the world’s worst dating profile (“I like animals and Grey’s Anatomy”), and only agreed to go to Ecuador so she can spend time with her flaky daughter.
Emily, naively chasing fun times, ends up hooking up with James, a hot guy at the bar who promises to take them on a day trip for some “culture”.
The two — American “white arseholes” in a foreign country — find themselves kidnapped by a local crime lord who intends to extort their family, an agoraphobic brother (Ike Barinholtz), for ransom.
The rest of the movie plays out with the mother and daughter trying to escape their captors in increasingly outlandish and suspend-your-disbelief plot contrivances.
One of the film’s redeeming qualities is that Schumer and Hawn has an easy, natural chemistry and you absolutely believe the bickering mother/daughter relationship between the two.
But in many ways, Hawn’s presence only highlights Schumer’s deficiencies. Schumer is a talented stand-up and writer but she struggles when the script calls for her to extend herself beyond being a bratty and awkward charmer.
Hawn has the range to do comedy and pathos with equal confidence and, more importantly, she understands the value of restraint. Schumer, less so.
Their polar-opposites dynamic is also one that worked before for writer Dipold in The Heat with Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in the uptight/laissez faire roles. But that film had Feig’s experienced comedic hands behind the camera as director (Feig is only a producer on Snatched).
Jonathan Levine, who directed well-received films 50/50 and Warm Bodies, couldn’t rescue the movie from its terrible plotting and pacing.
There are some great laugh-out loud moments (“Welcome/whale cum”) and the supporting characters have a lot of fun (Barinholtz and Wanda Sykes are highlights) but there are a lot more misses than there are hits.
Snatched is narratively incoherent and often really boring. It’s more like an extended sketch show where only every second or third joke works.
Rating: 2/5
Snatched is in cinemas from today.
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Originally published as Snatched is an incoherent let-down