Snatched

I like Amy Schumer.  I just like her.  In 2015's Trainwreck, she showed a great amount of comedic screen presence, and managed to win me over.  She won me over once again in Snatched, an uneven comedy that has some laughs, but not enough to carry it all the way through.  Still, Schumer manages to rise above the hit or miss material, and is always interesting to watch.

It's also great to see Goldie Hawn on the big screen again, making her first appearance since 2002's The Banger Sisters.  Like Schumer, she shows a natural on screen presence, as well as wonderful chemistry with her co-star.  The two women work so well together up on the screen that you almost start to wonder why they hadn't been paired up sooner.  You also kind of wish that the screenplay by Katie Dippold (The Heat) was more up to their level of talent.  It's pleasant and it never offends, but it's not much more than that.  It's a good concept for an action comedy, but it never truly goes for broke, and makes these characters into ones we can get behind.  We only get behind them because Schumber and Hawn are there, giving this material their all.  We like watching them, and we fall in love with them, not the characters they're playing.

The film's strongest half is the first 20 minutes, because we get the sense that Schumer was allowed to improvise a lot with her dialogue and character.  And while she's not playing all that different of a character than she did in Trainwreck, she's still a lot of fun to watch and gets some laughs.  Her Emily is a hard-drinking and somewhat selfish woman whose life already seems to be going nowhere, but then she loses her job and her boyfriend on the same day.  The two had been planning a romantic getaway to Ecuador at the time he dumps her, and the trip is nonrefundable.  She can't find any friends to go on the trip with her, so she turns in desperation to her last choice, her mother.  Hawn plays Linda, her mother, an overly cautious cat lady-type who pretty much gave up on her dreams after her husband divorced her years ago.  After much coaxing, Emily is eventually able to convince her mom to come on the trip. ("Help me put the 'fun' back in 'nonrefundable' ".)

The two travel to Ecuador (the film was actually shot in Hawaii), where Emily has a chance encounter at the hotel bar with a charming British man (Tom Bateman).  He immediately takes a liking to her, and takes Emily and her mother sightseeing.  However, it all turns out to be a trap, as the two women find themselves kidnapped by some smugglers who hold them for ransom.  The villains in Snatched are largely interchangeable, and never get to create any real personalities.  They exist simply to chase the two women all over the island, and shoot at them once in a while.  This is around the point when the movie sinks.  Schumer and Hawn do what they can with their roles, and manage to hold the interest of the audience.  Nothing else does, however.  What starts as a very clever mother-daughter comedy turns into a chase picture, and a fairly conventional one at that.

The movie does try to liven things up by having the women encounter some weirdos along the way.  These include a goofy guide who tries to help them get through the Amazon to safety (Christopher Meloni, getting some laughs here), as well as a vacationing lesbian couple (Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack) who use Special Forces training to help the lead characters out of various situations.  Sykes and Cusack are interesting to watch, but the movie never gives them as much to do as we would hope, so they're kind of left adrift in the movie.  There is also an amusing subplot concerning Emily's brother back home (Ike Barinholtz) dealing with a largely disinterested and quick tempered Stare Department official (Bashir Salahuddin) that gets some off-kilter moments, but again, seems to be held back somewhat by the rather conventional motions of the rest of the film.

Snatched manages to be a pleasant enough diversion, but it never aspires to be anything more.  It's the kind of movie that you wish was better, because there is stuff that works here, and the cast is clearly giving it their all.  I do want to see Schumer in a movie again, one that hopefully takes full advantage of what she can do.

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