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Taylorsville Journal

Dan's Review: "Snatched" only smells funny

May 12, 2017 03:27PM ● By Dan Metcalf

Goldie Hawn and Amy Schumer in Snatched - © 2017 - 20th Century Fox.

Snatched (20th Century Fox)

Rated R for crude sexual content, brief nudity, and language throughout.

Starring Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Ike Barinholtz, Joan Cusack, Wanda Sykes, Tom Bateman, Christopher Meloni, Óscar Jaenada.

Written by Katie Dippold.

Directed by Jonathan Levine.

GRADE: D+

REVIEW:

There are two kinds of funny:  “Ha-ha funny,” and “this smells funny.” It seems many comedians often confuse the two, delivering content that leaves you with a lingering stench. Amy Schumer is a funny comedian, but her latest film project Snatched leans far into the “smells funny” category, and that’s putting it mildly.

Schumer stars as Emily, a self-absorbed millennial brat whose boyfriend dumps her a few weeks before they are supposed to head out on a non-refundable trip to Ecuador. Unable to find a replacement, Emily begs her paranoid mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) to go along, leaving Emily’s agoraphobic brother Jeffrey (Ike Barinholtz) at home with his mother’s numerous cats in White Plains. When the women arrive in Ecuador, Emily is immediately charmed by a hunky Brit named James (Tom Bateman), who lures them on an adventure through the country’s outback. Once there, the women are taken hostage by a group of local thugs, who call Jeffrey demanding ransom. Jeffrey freaks out and begins to harass a disinterested state department officer (Bashir Salahuddin) into rescuing them. Meanwhile, the ladies escape their captors, killing a few of them on the way. They seek the help of an American “Adventurer” (Christopher Merloni), two retired special ops ladies (Wanda Sykes and Joan Cusack) and some native tribes people along the way, while trying to patch up their strained mother/daughter relationship as the bad guys pursue.

Snatched is definitely “funny,” but only in the smelly sense. There are few laughs, and most of the jokes have to do with Schumer’s anatomy and the bodily functions/hygiene of her most private parts. The rest of the film is spent on racist tropes about the 3rd world and obvious realization that Schumer’s character (or lack thereof) is a non-starter. The script and story are especially lazy, taking all sorts of liberties with geography, culture and reality. Goldie Hawn’s character is even more pointless, having been reduced to a whiny, single cat lady afraid of her own shadow. It’s more than a little disappointing that Snatched is her first movie in 15 years.

It’s almost as if Schumer (who also produced the film) had some sort of fangirl fantasy about working with Hawn and used Snatched as an excuse to dance with her in the end credits. It seems as though Schumer spent 90 minutes not developing the main characters and suddenly sprang an unexplained “happy ending,” making Snatched smell even funnier, and not in a good way. 


Snatched Trailer

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