SECUESTRO EXPRESS
Directed & Written by: Jonathan Jakubowicz.
Produced by: Sandra Condito, Salomón Jakubowicz & Jonathan Jakubowicz.
Director of Photography: David Chalker.
Edited by: Ethan Maniquis.
Music by: Angelo Milli.
Released by: Miramax.
Language: Spanish with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Venezuela. 86 min. Rated: R.
With: Mia Maestro, Carlos Julio Molina, Pedro Perez, Carlos Madera, Jean Paul Leroux & Rubén Blades.

A fast-paced, terrifying look at a booming business in Latin America - kidnapping - Secuestro Express is a reality check for the flaunting rich. Owners of designer clothes and fancy cars are magnets for criminals, who spend the thousands of dollars exhorted from petrified parents on drugs and jewelry or food and medicine for their poverty-stricken families. According to the press notes, every hour someone is kidnapped in Latin America; only 70 percent survive.

Carla (Mia Maestro) and Martin (Jean Paul Leroux), a seemingly happy upper-class Venezuelan couple, become victims of three thugs after a night of drinking and dancing at a ritzy club. What follows is a violent, frantic, nerve-wracking evening full of drugs, guns, blood, and beatings as the kidnappers drive around Caracas for their ransom. Along the way, Carla accidentally learns a shocking secret about her fiancé when the group stops at a drug dealer's apartment for cocaine. Perhaps the most despairing scenes involve the police; when facing a roadblock, the kidnappers easily appease officers with bribes.

Secuestro Express is just as disturbing as its producers' past films - Sin City and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. But while these films inundate viewers with elaborate gun battles and excessive gore, Secuestro Express is intense in its suggested violence - Carla is almost raped throughout the film and guns are repeatedly jammed against the victims' heads.

In his storytelling, director Jonathan Jakubowicz is often as objective as a journalist. His seeming message is: Thugs are humans too, and the rich aren't angels. Kidnapper Budu (Pedro Perez) taunts and gropes Carla, but comforts his sick adolescent daughter when she calls during the kidnapping; Martin ingests so much cocaine that he makes himself sick.

But perhaps the film's most thought-provoking and powerful message comes in the closing scene through narration, leaving viewers with something to chew on: one half of the world is dying from hunger and the other from obesity. Deborah Lynn Blumberg
August 5, 2005