Movie Reaction: Snatched

Formula: (The Guilt Trip + Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle) * Romancing the Stone

Comedy duos come in many configurations. Different genders, ages, races, or, as Turner & Hooch showed us, species. The only thing that they all need is conflicting personalities. “Buddy cop” movies are so common because it’s a great way to force an unlikely pairing - it's their job. One of the less seen pairings is parent and child. That makes sense. There's not much discovery there. Even estranged family members know each other pretty well, and the blood connection means there’s already a commitment to one another. The last few attempts I’ve seen to pair two generations of the same family (Tammy, The Guilt Trip) haven’t been great. With the extreme premise, I hoped Snatched could change the trend.

That extreme premise is a simple one. Emily (Amy Schumer) is a 30-something mess who just got dumped by her boyfriend. She has already paid for a non-refundable trip to Ecuador with him though. When none of her friends want to join her, she brings her neurotic mother, Linda (Goldie Hawn), with her. And, they get snatched by some men hoping to collect a ransom. They escape and have to survive in the Amazon rain forest as they search for safety. Along the way, some crazy shit happens.

This is being billed as a two-hander with Schumer and Hawn. It’s not. This is Amy Schumer’s film. I think of it as her Identity Thief. That was Melissa McCarthy’s follow-up to Bridesmaids. It was the test to see if the “Melissa McCarthy” character could be used elsewhere successfully. Snatched is Schumer’s test after scoring with Trainwreck. Schumer’s results are better, but she has some of the same problems McCarthy had. She has to do too much of the heavy lifting. Filmmakers tend to forget that even a great comedic performer benefits from having a good character to play as a foundation. Emily is an under-written character. You get the sense in nearly every scene, that someone said “Amy will find a way to make it funny”. Often, she’s able to make it work. Other times, she’s left flailing, trying to find a punchline that isn’t there. While they relied too much on Amy Schumer, they didn’t take advantage of having Goldie Hawn at all. She made a career out of playing ditzes who are actually quite sly beneath the surface. There’s none of that here. Linda could be played by nearly anyone. There’s no sign of why they wanted Hawn for the part. This is Hawn’s first movie in 15 years, so maybe she’s out of practice. I don’t really want to lay the blame on her though.

Once you get past the poorly-written lead roles and very thin story, the movie is pretty decent. It’s not a laugh riot, but there are enough good jokes to keep it interesting. There are a couple delightfully zany bits of physical comedy by Schumer. Katie Dippold’s script loves to undercut the jokes you expect by hitting punchlines a beat or two earlier. Ike Barinholtz and Bashir Salahuddin nearly steal the movie with their escalating scenes as Schumer’s brother and the government agent in charge of finding the women respectively. Other actors like Christopher Meloni, Wanda Sykes, and Joan Cusack show up for jokes that are so stupid that they kind of work.

Mostly though, your opinion of this movie will depend on how funny you find Amy Schumer. And, I mean Amy Schumer, the performer. She didn’t write this. So, if you are like “I love Inside Amy Schumer and/or Trainwreck”, try to think about if you loved the writing in those or loved that it was Amy Schumer delivering those lines. I could be a lot more savage about this movie. I didn’t care for much of it. Some of that is personal taste. The jokes didn’t land at a high enough rate for me to ignore my other issues. I imagine other people will be far more forgiving (similar to how I devoured Free Fire a few weeks ago in a way that other audiences didn’t, all because I loved its specific sense of humor). In other words, this is one of those super helpful Reactions I give that could be summed up as “Meh. It could be worse”.

Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend