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.