Ransom films need a new look.
When was the last time you saw a kidnapper snap and shoot the kid, the wife or whoever was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
“Trapped” serves as a perfect example of this stereotype.
Since we know that everything will be put back in its place in the end, what is the point?
The answer is building up suspense for the purpose of entertainment. Call it sadism, call it taking pleasure in the pain of others.
The lives of Will Jennings (Stuart Townsend) and his wife Karen (Charlize Theron) are about to change when they are sought out by a team of kidnappers looking for the easy dollar.
The rules are simple; they have 24 hours to get $250,000 without contacting police officers. If either rule is broken, their daughter dies.
Joe Hickey (Kevin Bacon), his wife Cheryl (Courtney Love) and cousin Marvin Pool (Pruitt Taylor Vince) discover they’ve picked the wrong person to kidnap when they find out their package is asthmatic.
New twists and turns are fed to the audience to increase the suspense as we soon realize the motive behind the crime.
The film finishes with a tremendous and unbelievable rescue effort full of stunts, explosives and gunfire.
We are thrown into the plot very quickly. No more than five minutes go by before the initial disruption.
There is no time to develop characters, leaving the audience to put the pieces together as the plot thickens.
The story makes audience members think their way through the film and develop characters on their own.
In the grand scheme of things, “Trapped” is predictable.
In a film, when a job is done, someone will always have a different agenda or ulterior motive, thereby putting the kibosh on the whole plan. There is no way a defined group of bad guys will get away with it.
The characters are well-defined despite very typical roles. Karen is taken out of her role as trophy wife and transformed into a protective mother. Similarly, Will’s life is turned upside-down and he is forced to take any action necessary to get his daughter back.
The product of the kidnapping genre usually takes the lives of normal people, shakes them up like snow globes and lets us watch them change until they are back to normal.
In a nutshell, the predictability of “Trapped” hurt the suspense a bit. But it is built back up by a slew of twists, turns and action sequences.
