FILM-FORWARD.COMReviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
SECUESTRO EXPRESS
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
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