Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (2015)

There is a peculiar purity to a film like Kidnapping Mr. Heineken. It asks nothing of its audience beyond a mild curiosity about the 1983 abduction of a beer magnate, and it delivers exactly that, no more. Daniel Alfredson's camera observes Amsterdam, a warehouse, a ransom, and a group of ambitious men with the flat efficiency of a police report read aloud at a modest press conference. Anthony Hopkins plays Freddy Heineken with the weary dignity of a man who has been kidnapped before and expects to be kidnapped again. The rest of the cast, an assembly of white European men in leather jackets, goes about the business of being criminals without a single glance toward the camera to explain themselves.

This is, by the standards of the current cultural moment, a kind of negative achievement. The film contains no thesis. It has no interest in interrogating the moral architecture of the ransom economy, no interest in the wives beyond their function as plot devices, and no interest in the wider social fabric of the Netherlands in 1983. Jemima West appears as Sonja Holleeder, makes a phone call, and the plot proceeds. The greed on display is individual and grubby, not systemic, which spares us the sermon. Nobody learns anything. Nobody grows. The beer money is counted.

The critics were unkind, and Variety's comparison to day-old beer with cigarette butts was vivid if not generous. Still, there is something almost restful about a B-movie crime saga that knows precisely what it is and refuses to pretend otherwise. It is a film about men in a warehouse, and it stays in the warehouse. No lesson is imparted. No audience is scolded. The credits roll, and we are free to go, slightly underwhelmed, entirely unimproved.