SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Numerootno A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

ChronicH If you want to know how we live, what our fears are, what can happen to ANYONE that goes out on the streets, this movie is a must see. And for those who say it's unrealistic I'll just tell you this: EVERYBODY that lives in caracas has a close friend or family that has been mugged, kidnapped or ruffied.True story.For those that say actors don't play well: Those guys are known Venezuelian singers and come from a very poor background. They know the life, they have lived it, they surely have never kidnapped everyone but in an environment where growing older than 25 years old is considered lucky, they have seen and done their fair share of violence.Little side note, this movie was supposed to be presented at the Oscars for the Best foreign movie. The only reason it wasn't even presented to voting is because the Venezuelian Government REFUSED to purpose it to the Oscars for the simple reason that those singers are against the so called "revolution" and that it draws a picture of Venezuelian's life that they didn't want known around the world at that time :).

Robert J. Maxwell Okay. We know that crimes like kidnapping and police corruption are common enough in some countries, but can we separate this particular piece of expository trash from the subject it deals with? It's a terrible movie in almost all respects. It's one of the ugliest movies ever made.The self righteousness of the writer/director, Jonathan Jakubowicz, spills out of every frame. Lord, how I hate being preached to, as if were some idiot desperately in need of enlightenment from some ambitious and complacent sage who believes he has all the answers. The epilogue spells it out, in case we missed it during the preceding hour and a half of pain. "The world is divided into halves -- the starving and the obese. And all we can do is take his food or invite him to the feast." Some sort of epigrammatic drivel like that.The message, I suppose, is that the poor are driven to crime out of desperation but Jakubowicz bungles even that. What we're left with is the conviction that everyone is rotten to the core -- rich and poor alike. So much for philosophy.As a director, Jakubowicz is right up there in the first rank of the fifth rate. Some comments, I notice, have blamed Quentin Tarantino for the style but that's misguided. Tarantino was an original in his first movies. I think Jakubowicz has borrowed heavily from Tarantino but he goes farther back than that for his technique -- back to MTV and ten-second television commercials. I counted four shots in which the camera did not move and the shot lasted one second or longer, then I got tired of waiting for the next one and stopped counting. The camera whirls dizzylingly, there are split-second close ups of eyeballs, ears, and gun muzzles. There are split screens. Sometimes the camera is strapped to the subject's chest. We see step motion and whiz bang pans. Fish-eye lenses turn the faces of people into those of porpoises. Unbearable.That's Jakubowicz the director. Then there is Jakubowicz the writer. The second is no improvement over the first. A gang of hoods kidnaps a rich young couple -- Maestro and Leroux -- and makes off with them, demanding a ransom. They taunt their captives. They pistol whip Leroux, call him names, punch his face repeatedly, while they cackle like maniacs. They argue and shout constantly at each other. They shoot for no reason at a couple of whores standing on the street. They relentlessly fog the air with the foulest of curses.And their captives? They may be rich young sophisticates but they're dopers too. Leroux turns out to be bisexual, much to the disgust of his fiancée. After she discovers this, Maestro, still held captive in the speeding car, begins to ridicule Leroux too. She asks if they have any grass for her to smoke and shares her Ecstasy with them. At times she joins in the insults of the gang and giggles along with them, although one or two cocked pistols are never more than a foot away from her beautiful nose. The police are easily bribed and the federal cops are sadistic rapists.There's no balance to the movie. Maestro is gorgeous but shallow. Leroux is a handsome coward. The quartet of sweaty gangsters has a collective intelligence equal to that of a doorknob. There's no one to root for.It isn't that the brutality, corruption, and crime are objectionable in themselves, nor is the lousy picture the film gives us of a city -- in this case Caracas, Venezuela. But similar subjects have been handled before, and exponentially better, in movies like "Serpico" or "Taxi Driver" or "Los Olvidados." This dumpster full of basura isn't worth any more comment. See it only if you really want a reason to hang yourself.

johnnyboyz There's a maddening, maddening scene in Secuestro Express in which a victim of a kidnapping ordeal is ordered to remove a substantially large amount of money from his bank account using his card, as the wrong-doers hold his female partner captive in a nearby jeep. Upon attaining the money, he's jumped by a third party thief; an individual whom hangs around the ATM machines, at whatever God-forsaken hour in the morning whilst no one is around, and jumps those removing hard cash from the machine. One of the kidnappers sees this and intervenes. It'll sound perverse, but it's an amusing situation; one of a number of gut wrenching and rather harrowing predicaments a number of characters find themselves in within Venezuelan born Jonathan Jakubowicz's film; a man painting a grim, glum and quite frightening picture of his home nation, indeed, his home city: the sort of place where the criminals try one over the criminals by targeting the weak in-between.That city is Caracas, the capital of the aforementioned Venezuela, as a number of short and sharp voice-overs consistently remind us. The set up is brief; the plunging us into a predicament is close to immediate, while the results are eerily effective. Express Kidnapping, to give it its English title, sees a young couple in Carla (Maestro) and Martin (Leroux) swiped off of the street by a gang of equally young, but significantly less-better off hoods armed with guns; a 4x4; a taste for ransom money and, eventually, an equally alarming taste for the lone female in the vehicle. The immediate beginning actually revolves around the kidnappers, with each of their names popping up on screen and a fast and frenetic aesthetic by way of edits and camera work sort-of complimenting the short, sharp and rough voice-overs that provide whatever back-story they're given. If we're honest, we might assume the film to be about them at this point.Jakubowicz demonstrates that he has an eye for particular styles that he knows complement particular passages of where we are in a film. His early style of hyper-kinetic and frothing mad camera complete with editing shoots all over the place before any audience member, indeed victim within the film, has any time to garner any sort of bearings. The early passage of events in the car shortly after the taking are brutal in their effectiveness. This is primarily, I think, because we, like the victims, are plunged into this predicament and share whatever confusion they do as we both come to terms with what's happened. The opening had gone to some length to introduce the kidnappers, only for the film to plunge us into the chaotic and 'flung-around' situation of the victims, thus we perceive things from their perspective and is an unexpected viewing position. The whole passage taps into a very primal fear linked to being in peril; held at ransom by an unknown force more powerful and larger in numbers than you as well as that sensation that automatically assuming whatever dreadful fate can happen, probably will.But the film levels out. Then again, perhaps it's the style that levels out. The automatic assumption that a highly stylised, and thus 'accessible', film that falls into some sort of crime genre embraces the acts on screen and renders them 'sexy' or 'fun' or 'good to look at' is easy. But this film isn't here to exploit, and its calming down following the initial incident is welcome as people begin to talk to one another and procedures are supposedly carried out. That isn't to say the danger evaporates, because it doesn't, but the kidnapped leads come to realise their situation and a similar progression is occurring with the audience as our own opinions and realisations on the situation are unfolding at exactly the same time.If we think of films that are either wildly kinetic in their delivery and overall feel or just carry that lush, good-looking sensibility from recent years, of which they might also be categorised as 'crime' films, Pierre Morel's 2008 film Taken might spring to mind. As also might one of Soderburgh's 'Ocean's' sequels – there may even be some that point to the first of that series. One of the very few films of this ilk from recent years that I thought pulled off this 'all over the place'; 'revenge and violence carries a certain "to be looked at-ness" appeal' without ever feeling exploitative was Tarantino's first Kill Bill volume; a film that utilised its female lead's chaotic and tragic circumstances to project real sense of anger as the film unfolded to whatever style and atmosphere Tarantino implemented on his text.I think Express Kidnapping balances whatever political or social issues the director has with what he's studying with that trashy, pulpy, throw-away approach you feel he wants to additionally get across. Carla's journey isn't necessarily about her developing as a female character and becoming more and more hard bodied, but then again it doesn't minimise her nor relegate her to any position of the 'weakling'. Rather, it is her partner that looses his head and she herself comes to identify the sexually charged predicament, using that to her advantage. More immediately, the film is concerned with the state of the the nation and these goings on. The film's ending is deceptively upbeat, but Jakubowicz is telling us the only real way anything is ever going to get done is if the scum continue to stalk the other scum and wipe them out for us, 'us' being the more innocent Venezuelans as well as the government themselves.Express Kidnapping doesn't exploit its subject matter for purposes of entertainment, while its shifts from a relaxed sense to a thoroughly frightening scenario throughout never feels mis-guided nor mis-judged. If more South American films can balance the 'accessibility' this film carries with a raw and social driven subject matter, I see nothing but good things for cinema from said part of the world.

Edgar Soberon Torchia The film representation of the characteristics of poverty in Latin America, and of the phenomena it originates, has developed through the years, from the populist portraits of the 1930s and 1940s, in which being poor almost equaled sainthood (as in "Nosotros, los pobres"), to the movies of today called "porno-misery" by some critics. In the early 1950s Luis Buñuel's "Los olvidados" turned the tables, with its depiction of a disturbing high level of cruelty among the child and teenager delinquents of México City, and it paved the way for movies based on serious research. In this vein, the documentary "Tire dié" made by Fernando Birri and his students was a filmed survey of marginalization and misery in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. Movies with a new approach were made, as "Romance del Anicento y la Francisca" in Argentina, "El chacal de Nahueltoro" in Chile, "Gamín" in Colombia, "Pixote" in Brazil, among others, as well as later works with aspirations for stronger sociological value, as "Sicario" from Venezuela or "La vendedora de rosas" in Colombia. These films painted a more precise picture of the social situation in Latin America, and of the underprivileged, without accusations or sermons. The release of "Cidade de Deus" marked the start of a curious phenomenon: although the film was based on a book that sustains the violent description of the story being told, most audiences and critics were dazzled by its technical virtuosity to describe violence, putting aside its social value. Since then we are having, from all fronts, movies that, using the consumerism ethics, and the aesthetics and rigor of a publicity spot, trivialize social inequity and misery, and glamorize crime. "Secuestro express" falls into this category. It is a Hollywood version of a frequent phenomenon - kidnapping. As almost all of the good or bad films dealing with poverty, there is no intention to point reasons: in these movies, you seldom hear of bad distribution of national wealth, hoarders, landowners or creole oligarchies that have sold their countries to transnationals. This is not the reason why I blame these movies, which have the right to make their own statement, but the accommodation of their own local situations to worn out formulas of traditional narratives, giving solutions to their dramas that, in the execution, resemble more foreign action movies, than Latin America realities. They even describe the characters as stereotypes of 1940s melodramas: these seldom react as they would in real life, but in a way that allows the creators to make "beautiful shots". For example, when the kidnapped woman (Mia Maestro) is released momentarily in a lonely place, far away from Caracas, instead of running for her life, she falls and cries in the dust, a strategy that permits the director and cinematographer to make a few nice shots of Maestro, and a chance to add a second ending to the story. The script follows a predictable direction (another example: of all the taxis in Caracas, the woman's runaway boyfriend boards the cab chauffeured by one of the kidnappers' accomplices), that unfortunately turns the movie into a catalog of common places. In the end, the authors divide the world in a 50% of hungry persons and 50% of well-bred folks. A little research would have revealed to them that, in the real world, the percentage of hungry people surpasses by a great margin the filmmakers' lack of information.