Grade (D+)
“Snatched” is directed by Jonathan Levine and stars; Amy Schumer & Goldie Hawn. The story is simple. A woman has been recently dumped, and takes her mom on a South American vacation that she was supposed to share with her boyfriend. They get kidnapped and wild antics ensue and they along the way explore the mother/daughter dynamic of their relationship.
Now up front, I will not hide the fact that I am not an Amy Schumer fan. All the bad press aside, I simply do not find her that funny and feel like her shtick is a little lacking in originality. She did land some laughs in “Trainwreck” but going into this film, I had honestly zero expectations. That is not to say this one didn’t have a chance with me. Given the hard-working, open-minded reviewer I am, I go into anything giving it a chance to entertain me. Because I tell you what, I do not commute around Southern California traffic to see something I hope I won’t like.
So, with that in mind I will tell you this film was pretty damn hilarious. It set up the characters in a comical fashion early on. Delivered some solid laughs, and was surprising me with some effective comical scenarios. Now that was for the first fifteen-minutes. Then the movie hit the cliff and fell over the edge without hesitation.
After the first-act, the jokes were just overly repetitive and relentless in their delivery. If you are not a fan of Schumer’s comedy then this will be a long ninety-minutes because she is pure Amy Schumer in this film, and not any form of a character in the story. Now I LOVE Goldie Hawn. She has delivered many entertaining performances over her long career. But she hasn’t been in a movie for like fifteen-years so I was very curious how she would do, and she does deliver some solid laughs and was fun to see perform in this role.
The story however was highly predictable, and I wasn’t really invested at all in the two leads. That isn’t to say this movie doesn’t land some laughs because it does. But none of them were extremely memorable, or anything I would really care to see ever again. The side characters luckily come in to steal the show and save this film from being a complete drag. Wanda Sykes, Ike Barinholtz, Joan Cusack, Randall Park and Christopher Meloni come in to inject this story-line with some much-needed laughs.
In particular Christopher Meloni who was the most memorable part of the movie. His character was hilarious, he delivers the persona perfectly and the result to me was a classic cameo character that can easily stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his Freakshow role from “Harold and Kumar” in terms of overall hilarity.
Overall though this was a long film to sit through with many more chuckles than laughs. If you love the Schumer shtick you will enjoy this one, it does fit that mother-daughter demographic very well also. But I think a general audience will find the joke attempts, as well as the story-line, very stale.
Ah man, I’m so glad you said you thought it was funny. I am also not a big Amy Schumer fan. I have nothing against her but her humor just isn’t my humor. I think Goldie Hawn’s amazing though, I mean, look at her. This movie isn’t out here yet but I was hoping it would be good because the clips I’ve seen I thought were funny. Let’s see what I think of it when it gets released here.
That said, would you be interested in sharing your thoughts and opinions on Movie Pilot? I’d love to invite you to join the platform, and to hear from you so I can to expand on what that means. Feel free to shoot me an e-mail, my contact details are on my “About” page. Hope to hear from you.