Snatched (2017)

Snatched arrives as a mother-daughter kidnapping comedy, a genre we did not know we needed and now suspect we did not. Amy Schumer plays Emily, freshly dumped and dragging her cautious mother Linda, played by Goldie Hawn in her first screen role in fifteen years, to Ecuador on a non-refundable vacation. They are abducted within days. What follows is a jungle caper of zip lines, dog whistles, and a tapeworm, executed with the enthusiasm of a production that has stopped auditing its own logic. The critical reception was cool. The box office was cooler.

For our purposes, the film registers as lightly, almost accidentally progressive. Its supporting cast is unusually diverse for a 2017 studio comedy, with Wanda Sykes, Raven Goodwin, Randall Park, and others filling out the margins, though the film never pauses to announce this as a virtue. Two of its more memorable figures are women veterans who assist with the rescue, and the whole enterprise is female-written and female-led, with two women steering the action. It stops well short of any thesis. The clearest marker of social awareness is Jeffrey, Emily's brother, written and played as agoraphobic, a genuine anxiety condition treated as an ongoing plot mechanism instead of a punchline.

Elsewhere the cupboard is bare. There are no queer characters, no climate concerns, no class critique, no body-positive message despite the star's public associations, and no historical subject to reinterpret. The film's treatment of South America, widely and justly criticized as xenophobic, moves in the opposite direction from any racial consciousness. It lectures no one, which is its one consistent restraint. A broad, silly, largely forgotten comedy, then, with a faint pulse of cultural awareness and no interest in raising it further.

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