Quite why Goldie Hawn chose to break her fifteen year absence from the big screen with Snatched is beyond me. And whatever she has had done to her face – perhaps an injection of “whale cum”, one of several lame one-liners misconstrued from “welcome” – her blank expression mirrored mine. For the screenplay, directed by Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies, 50/50) and written by Katie Dippold (The Heat, Ghostbusters), lacks subtlety and wit. And is more a belly flop than a belly laugh.

Amy Schumer plays Emily Middleton, a directionless thirty-something fired from her job as a retail assistant for trying on rather than selling off clothes and dumped by her musician boyfriend Michael (Randall Park) who like his career is “taking off” in search of “a ton of pussy”. With no-one to accompany her on her non-refundable holiday to Ecuador, she manages to prize her feline-loving mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) away from her agoraphobic brother Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz).

Within days of their arrival, they are both kidnapped by a South American gangster Morgado (Óscar Jaenada) after being lured into a honeytrap by a dishy Englishman James (Tom Bateman). Thereafter, it’s a cat-and-mouse chase through the “waterfalls and rainbows” of the Amazon jungle involving a series of tepid set-pieces including tapeworm removal and urethral torture at the hands of barbaric Barb (Joan Cusack), a “platonic friend” of ruthless Ruth (Wanda Sykes) and ex-special ops agent who to avoid forced confessions ripped out her tongue.

I nearly ripped out my eyeballs. Sure, the pace is snappy, the running time short and the action gathers momentum; it’s great to see Goldie Hawn back on the big screen again; and there are a couple of zingers, mostly from the waspish tongue of Ruth: “Never have more drinks than you have tits.” But it lacks bite and is desperately short of laughs. So much so that I turn to Linda’s reaction to the death of her rescuer Roger Simmons (Christopher Meloni) for my summary: “Fuck! Shit! Oh my god!”

Video courtesy of: 20th Century Fox

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Peter Callaghan
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