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Los Angeles mayoral candidate Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck)’s life and political campaign are thrown into turmoil when a kidnapper calls to say his son is being held hostage.
Why is Ben Affleck so fascinated by kidnappings? His career behind the camera has often been a topic to return to: his outstanding directorial debut, 2007; It’s gone baby it’s gonewas all about the search for a missing 4-year-old, and was also his hilarious 2012 Oscar-winning film. argo It is a dramatization of the 1979 Iran hostage incident. There is also an element of kidnapping in the 2010s. the town And in 2016 live by night. So it is animalIt’s probably the weakest of his directorial efforts to date, but it still has its merits.
Affleck plays Mark Kimball, a lawyer and Army veteran turned aspiring politician who aims to run for mayor of Los Angeles. The opening credits montage plays out like a political ad campaign, showing Affleck as a character who’s never been afraid to show his political stripes off-camera, making him a very believable career politician type, square jaw and sharp shoulders. The loud fluttering of his feathers provides a sharp contrast to the rest of the film.
Mark is about to face the worst day of his life, just as his kidnapper promised in a voice-modulated phone call. It is assumed that his son has been kidnapped during a trick, and Mark and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) are in a state of complete panic. Affleck, representing a sudden new reality with a stressful person in real time, truly abandons all semblance of calm here, and the couple’s reaction to the crisis immediately turns frantic, choking, and yelling.
This is where things start to devolve into genre silliness. When the Kimball family is unable to raise the $7 million ransom demanded by the kidnappers, Mark’s snake-like advisor Sam (Steven Yeun) suggests the somewhat legally gray option of hiring the mysterious Dale (Gillian Anderson, in the film). iron lady Mode) It’s Winston Wolf in some sort of white pants. She solves problems. She’s also one of the most overwritten characters, filled with dialogue like “Leverage is the balance between the attractiveness of an incentive and the consequences of rejection.”
Affleck is clearly trying to promote this movie as the kind of cheesy mid-budget potboiler thriller they don’t make anymore, and there are flashes of that here. There’s some good stuff about the secrets kept in long-term relationships (“In marriage, like any other criminal conspiracy, you’re either all in or all out,” he says sarcastically). It would have been a fascinating watch if Affleck’s real-life ex-wife, Jennifer Garner, had played Abigail as originally cast.
But ultimately it feels a bit disposable, designed more for streaming than the weighty theatrical fare of his earlier directorial efforts. There are some neat moral quandaries to get you into, and some genuinely interesting social and racial politics woven into the narrative, but there are also some very cheap and obvious tropes, and some very stupid ones. deus ex machina In the last big explosion. Let’s hope his next kidnapping movie has more success.
Mixed bag. It’s far from Affleck’s best work, but there are glimmers of his muscle and sharpness as a filmmaker and actor.