MAY 18, 2017
On paper, “Snatched” must have looked like a home run.
First, there’s Amy Schumer, the Emmy-winning comic actress who is coming off her hugely successful 2015 film “Trainwreck,” although, unlike “Trainwreck,” Schumer would not be writing “Snatched” (though she reportedly wound up rewriting it anyway). The script is credited to Katie Dippold, who also wrote the well-regarded female buddy film “The Heat” and last year’s less well-regarded “Ghostbusters” reboot. Whether or not her jokes worked in those films, there was a female sensibility to both films that would seem to be totally in Schumer’s wheelhouse.
But the real excitement around “Snatched” is that it marked the return to the screen of Goldie Hawn, who has not made a film in the last 15 years. Most movie fans had assumed she had retired from a career that not only brought her an Oscar (“Cactus Flower”) but also a legacy of classic screen comedies from “Shampoo” to “Private Benjamin.” So it stood to reason that the “Snatched” script must have something worthy to bring Hawn out of her retirement. Right?
Alas, no.
I saw “Snatched” at a local cinema and could tell right away that this audience was primed to laugh as they guffawed loudly at even the lamest of jokes. But slowly the laughter began to diminish as the film progressed, and by the last half-hour, the mood was as solemn as an Ingmar Bergman film festival.
The set-up is promising. Emily Middleton is that familiar Schumer character — the loud, selfish, semi-alcoholic party girl, who is dumped by her on-the-rise musician boyfriend (a virtually unrecognizable Randall Park from ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat”). This comes as the couple is about to leave on a non-refundable trip to Ecuador. Though devastated, a determined Emily asks all of her girlfriends to join her instead and is turned down every time. (They must have gone on vacation with her before.)
In desperation, Emily persuades her overprotective, tightly-wound mother Linda (Hawn) to join her. Linda, who lives to slather half a tube of sunscreen on Emily’s back, is content to read her book and refuses to to leave the resort’s compound. That changes when Emily meets a handsome but smarmy Brit (Tom Bateman), who invites Emily and Linda on a car tour of the local area, a trip during which both women are kidnapped and held for ransom.
It’s at this point where the tone of Dippold’s script goes off the rails. She has mixed comedy and violence together rather successfully in “The Heat,” but at least that film had a police setting. By the time Emily violently kills her second person here, what few laughs there have been in “Snatched” begin to dry up. So the script falls back on fart jokes and a strange sequence involving pulling a large tapeworm out of Emily’s mouth.
Fortunately, director Jonathan Levine has a top-notch collection of supporting actors to try to fill the comedy void. Fellow resort guests and “platonic friends” Ruth (Wanda Sykes) and Barb (Joan Cusack) provide a kick to the film every time they appear. Although why would you cast Joan Cusack, who has one of the funniest voices in movies today in a non-speaking role? (Barb has cut out her own tongue — don’t ask.) And Christopher Meloni has a great bit as the master of the jungle (so he thinks).
If there is a saving grace in “Snatched” is the joy of watching Schumer and Hawn interact. Even when the material is not there, as it is not most of the time, the pair look like they’re having a ball together.
I’m glad that someone was having a good time.
GRADE: C
