Movie Review: Snatched (2017)

I’m spending more time than I should trying to guess if the many vagina jokes in Amy Schumer’s sophomore effort are the reason for its title, Snatched, or not. I’m leaning towards a “yes” because using a double entendre is clever, lots of vagina jokes are funny — at least that’s what Ms. Schumer wants us to believe hence her consistent use of them — and the snatching (aka kidnapping) that drives this sloppy vagina of a comedy is so stupid I’d hate to think the movie was titled after it.

Baiting a tape worm with a hunk of meat and yanking it out of the throat when it slithers out to chow down is beyond stupid too. But we get all of these and an obviously tired Goldie Hawn (who last made a screen appearance 15 years ago in “The Banger Sisters”) as well. Aren’t we the lucky ones.

Hawn, against her and her agent’s better judgment, plays Linda Middleton, a cautious divorcee who worries about her loser daughter Emily (Schumer) and babies her agoraphobic son Dylan (Ike Barinholtz, “Suicide Squad”). Unfortunately for her, Emmie gets dumped by her boyfriend on the eve of their going to Ecuador for a vacation, so mommy gets to be the last second fill-in.

Cue stupidity at its lowest level.

Their first encounter at the resort is with annoying vacationer Wanda Sykes (“Evan Almighty”) and her tongueless, platonic lady-friend Joan Cusack (“The End of the Tour”) who warns the dynamic duo to stay on property between talking all sorts of nonsense. However, that bit of advice is duly ignored as Emily and Linda go off premises with a charming guy (Tom Bateman, “Much Ado About Nothing”) who turns out to be not so charming of a guy.

Soon the ladies are splendidly overacting — if you can call what they’re doing acting at all — as they try to escape the clutches of their inept captors. Ha, Emily tripped over her flip-flops while trying to escape! Ha-Ha, Emily accidentally shoots a man in the throat with a spear gun! Ha-Ha-Ha, Dylan repeatedly threatens a State Department official (Bashir Salahuddin, “Looking” TV series) who promptly threatens him back! Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha, Emily does or says some other obnoxious shit while Linda looks on with disappointment! Or is that horror on Goldie’s face (it’s genuinely hard to tell with all the alleged Botox injections).

Quite literally, and I mean literally, the only chuckle that escaped my mouth during the 90 minutes that was “snatched” away from me while viewing Snatched was thanks to Christopher Meloni (“The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” but best know for his role on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” TV series) who shows up briefly as an adventurer and supposed savior. Oh, if only there were more fun, inventive characters such as he . . .

But there’s not. And so Snatched, ends as one would expect, not as one would hope (you know, with Emily getting strung up and quartered). Kinda unexpected is how badly the movie misses its mark. It’s okay for the film to be a ridiculously dumb action comedy; its not okay for there to be no believable mother and daughter bond in what is a mother and daughter bonding movie. And not only did Katie Dippold (“Ghostbusters”) not write one in, the chemistry between Hawn and Schumer is virtually nonexistent which makes the whole proceedings all the more difficult to stomach.

“Trainwreck” proved there is a space for Schumer’s brand of comedy if it has a heart buried within it. Snatched proves once that heart is removed, the tramp routine is best left to the back alleyways.