Target practice
Mark Steyn
Trapped 15, selected cinemas
Kelvin Bacon is so splendid in good rash (Wild Things, Tremors) that it pains one to see him in bad trash. Trapped goes wrong from its title, which presumably refers to the plot — a kidnapping — but is also a perfect precis of how the participants in this fevered movie must have felt and, in its generic blandness, is surely the first admission of defeat in a picture that never figures out quite what it's about.
Bacon is the swaggering psycho heading up a trio of kidnappers, also including a raddled old slapper played by Courtney Love and a pudgy rustic simpleton played by Pruitt Taylor Vince. This isn't the most obvious line-up for a successful kidnap gang. But they've managed to pull off four quarter-million dollar jobs before they make the mistake of kidnapping the daughter of a seaplane-flying anaesthesiologist who's invented a paralysing relaxant. If there's an idiot's guide to successful kidnappings, I would imagine the first rule is to steer clear of seaplane-flying anaesthesiologists who've invented paralysing relaxants. One would charitably put this down to bad luck, except that, as it emerges, ol' Kevin has done quite a bit of research on his intended target. The paralysing relaxant seems to have been invented mainly for the novelty value of a scene in which Courtney Love is offered a drug she'd rather not try.
Trapped hits the ground running around in circles and never looks back, or forward. It's one of those films full of surprises which are never surprising. The first nonsurprise is that the kidnapped child, Abby (Dakota Fanning), is asthmatic. It is becoming an inviolable convention of the moppet-endangerment genre that a healthy child is no longer sufficient, he or she must be asthmatic or diabetic. This is an early hint for Kevin Bacon that his ingenious plan will not be going like clockwork. Indeed, part of the reason why Trapped is so utterly lacking in any sense of danger is that, from the beginning, one is aware that the victims — Charlize Theron, Stuart Townsend and Miss Fanning — have a psychological advantage over Bacon, Love and Vince. Hardly anything bad happens to the child or her parents, but the poor old kidnappers get put through the wringer, lurching from near fatal injections to near castrations. For all Kevin's cocksure cruelty, it doesn't help that his accomplices have an unfortunate tendency to doze off at crucial moments in the kidnapping.
Luis Mandoki directed and Greg Iles wrote it, based on his own book, 24 Hours, and it never seems to have occurred to either man that, when you start off so frantic and insane, there's nowhere to go. A thriller thrills by its subversion of normality, but, when there's no normality to undermine, it's hard to thrill. The finale is one of the most hilariously inept in years: it involves the seaplane, a logging truck and a 60-car highway pile-up after which everybody sportingly remains in his vehicle so that the stars can run around the smouldering wreckage whacking each other with tire irons without any extras getting in the way. Acting opportunities are limited, since the script mostly requires the players to look progressively more desperate and sweaty as they pick themselves up and stagger on to the next plot twist. Enjoyable as Kevin's psycho shtick usually is, you can't help feeling he's miscast here.
Purely by coincidence, the other day I happened to be re-watching Suddenly, Lewis Allen's 1954 thriller with Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, etc. Frank hadn't quite fully emerged from his pre-From Here To Eternity slump, which is part of what makes the film such fun: instead of palling around with Crosby or Kelly and romancing Kim Novak or Rita Hayworth, one of the great icons of the 20th century is pulling his weight in an ensemble piece with reliable Fifties B-movie types. He plays, like Bacon does, a somewhat unstable type leading his accomplices through a plan that's perfect on paper. As in Trapped, his victims quickly get the measure of him and start messing with his head. But Suddenly is far more secure in its sense of itself. Unlike Trapped, the one-word title isn't just a lame generality pulled off the shelf: it refers to the setting — the sleepy small town of Suddenly, California. You get the feeling it would never have occurred to the makers of Trapped to set it in Trapped, Oregon. They don't think that way, and their clumsiness is perhaps the film's saving grace. An efficient thriller about child kidnapping would seem disgustingly manipulative and exploitative, but Trapped is so incompetent those are the least of its worries.
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