What a terrible, rotten movie.
To start with, the character played by Alan Rickman, the Nobel prize winner, was not the least bit believable. It isn't that Rickman played the role badly, but just that the character is not a believable character. If you were to come across this story as a novel, I am sure that you would find the 1st chapter ridiculous and put it down and not finish it.
I don't like movies that clearly are put together so as to convince me of one thing and then turn around and change things. This is not the same thing as a clever plot twist. Early during the kidnapping, you naturally ask yourself if the son is in on the kidnapping. You look for evidence of that, but the way that the scenes play out, it is overwhelmingly apparent from his behavior and the behavior of the kidnapper that the son being kidnapped has no knowledge of the kidnapping. Then after doing everything that they can do to make you think this, they reveal that the son is in on it. This simply bad move making. In fact, it is simply awful. I wanted to leave, but having paid for the ticket, I sat through the rest of it, and it only got worse.
To pull off the retrieval of the ransom, they do a vehicle switch, which is staged inside a crowded shopping mall, using a couple of Mini vehicles. The first problem with this is that there is no way in hades that a vehicle of that sort could move around like that in a crowded shopping mall without running into all sorts of stuff including people. It is ridiculous. The car that they used for the switch was shipped into the mall in parts and assembled during one night by one person. But the real problem here is how they managed to convert the read car that was on display in the mall, into a car that could be controlled by remote control. They way that they did this, as it really, really was shown in the movie, is that the accomplice set up a distraction and then slapped some sort of gadget onto the underneath of the car when no one was looking. Give me a break. In what fantasy land is it possible to convert a car to a full remote control merely by slapping some sort of gadget to the undercarriage? When this scene was shown, it was not yet revealed what it was about, and only later did it become apparent that this was how he supposedly converted that car to remote control. When I realized this, that was when it was beyond apparent that this movie is just some cheap story that someone threw together in a few hours and then went out and hired some actors and a director and started filming. It is a bad, bad story, with an absurd plot.
But as bad as all that was, it got worse by an order of magnitude as soon as the kidnapping was pulled off and the son and the accomplice parted ways. What happens after than is so utterly preposterous that I can't even lower myself to telling you about it. The accomplice, who is the bastard son of the Nobel prize winning father and by all evidence a genius in the first part of the movie, now demonstrates that he is really, really stupid beyond belief. It starts off not the least bit believable, and just becomes increasingly less believable as the story progresses. What else can I say? This is just a very, very bad movie, and I cannot believe that there are so many people who would be even moderately entertained by such a bad story, much less give it the high ratings that it is getting. If you are intelligent and enjoy a clever story, you are going to be insulted by this bad story.
To start with, the character played by Alan Rickman, the Nobel prize winner, was not the least bit believable. It isn't that Rickman played the role badly, but just that the character is not a believable character. If you were to come across this story as a novel, I am sure that you would find the 1st chapter ridiculous and put it down and not finish it.
I don't like movies that clearly are put together so as to convince me of one thing and then turn around and change things. This is not the same thing as a clever plot twist. Early during the kidnapping, you naturally ask yourself if the son is in on the kidnapping. You look for evidence of that, but the way that the scenes play out, it is overwhelmingly apparent from his behavior and the behavior of the kidnapper that the son being kidnapped has no knowledge of the kidnapping. Then after doing everything that they can do to make you think this, they reveal that the son is in on it. This simply bad move making. In fact, it is simply awful. I wanted to leave, but having paid for the ticket, I sat through the rest of it, and it only got worse.
To pull off the retrieval of the ransom, they do a vehicle switch, which is staged inside a crowded shopping mall, using a couple of Mini vehicles. The first problem with this is that there is no way in hades that a vehicle of that sort could move around like that in a crowded shopping mall without running into all sorts of stuff including people. It is ridiculous. The car that they used for the switch was shipped into the mall in parts and assembled during one night by one person. But the real problem here is how they managed to convert the read car that was on display in the mall, into a car that could be controlled by remote control. They way that they did this, as it really, really was shown in the movie, is that the accomplice set up a distraction and then slapped some sort of gadget onto the underneath of the car when no one was looking. Give me a break. In what fantasy land is it possible to convert a car to a full remote control merely by slapping some sort of gadget to the undercarriage? When this scene was shown, it was not yet revealed what it was about, and only later did it become apparent that this was how he supposedly converted that car to remote control. When I realized this, that was when it was beyond apparent that this movie is just some cheap story that someone threw together in a few hours and then went out and hired some actors and a director and started filming. It is a bad, bad story, with an absurd plot.
But as bad as all that was, it got worse by an order of magnitude as soon as the kidnapping was pulled off and the son and the accomplice parted ways. What happens after than is so utterly preposterous that I can't even lower myself to telling you about it. The accomplice, who is the bastard son of the Nobel prize winning father and by all evidence a genius in the first part of the movie, now demonstrates that he is really, really stupid beyond belief. It starts off not the least bit believable, and just becomes increasingly less believable as the story progresses. What else can I say? This is just a very, very bad movie, and I cannot believe that there are so many people who would be even moderately entertained by such a bad story, much less give it the high ratings that it is getting. If you are intelligent and enjoy a clever story, you are going to be insulted by this bad story.