TRAPPED (Luis Mandoki, 2002)

Reviewed: September 27th

Usually when films aren't advanced screened for critics, it's an indication of unmitigated badness, a turkey so horrendous the studios know critics will universally devour the poultry like a pack of famished wolves. The hope is that by delaying reviewers' feast for a few days, at least a handful of the injudicious will blindly flock to the movie under the absence of a critical compass.

Not necessarily so in the case of Trapped, Columbia Pictures' halfway involving, sometimes robust new thriller starring Kevin Bacon and Charlize Theron. Trapped's lack of press screenings is not so much a sign of its quality (which hovers around pretty decent), as a sign of our times. Pic deals with a young girl's abduction and Columbia decided that, after a rash of brutal child abduction/murder cases splashed across headlines all summer, it was best to let their hits-too-close-to-home film quietly die. Don't screen it, don't have the stars promote it, just drop Trapped in a few thousand theaters and watch some mice run through the maze.

But here's what I find sad: If Columbia was actually proud of their film, if Columbia had actually made a film that deals with child abduction cases in a thoughtful, incisive manner, they'd be all too happy to release Trapped. It'd be publicized (and reviewed/received) as a much-needed salve, a useful, fictional examination of why so many children get kidnapped and then slain.

It's a shame studios are so thick-skinned that only tragic, real-life events can force them into a momentary bout of conscience-growing/navel-gazing. Trapped's situation is somewhat unique compared to the blanket postponement of September 11th-inflicted films last year; at least that throng ended up getting fully supported releases, however far in the future they may have been. Here is a case of a major motion picture studio willfully and deliberately obliterating their product via complete lack of marketing support (indeed, Trapped, though wide-released in 2,227 theaters, rustled up only a paltry $3.2 million over its opening weekend).

It's not that Trapped doesn't have its share of plus column checkmarks: Jerry Greenberg's (The French Connection, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Apocalypse Now, Kramer vs. Kramer) crisp editing stands out, ditto Charlize Theron's accurately pitched hysteria as "the mother" (probably her best performance yet) and the wonderfully uncomfortable, understated, oddly kinda tender interactions between Pruitt Taylor Vince (one of the kidnappers) and Dakota Fanning (the kidnapped daughter). I wish there'd been a lot more of those interactions-- I am reminded of the excellent Clint Eastwood film A Perfect World, in which the entire movie is predicated on the dynamics of a peculiar abductor/abducted relationship.

All in all, Trapped is a conventionally entertaining thriller up to the point when I realized (despite its somewhat auspicious beginnings) the film wasn't going to begin to offer any sort of hereto unknown nuance, aspect, insight, glimmer, idea etc. etc. into children's abductions (revelation = around the middle mark). Once Bacon's character's (primary kidnapper) motivation is revealed, it's collective groan-ville, then tune-out time from there on out (BTW Bacon's character severely suffers from the John-Broken-Arrow-Travolta "wahoo look at me I'm crrrazzzzzzzy!" syndrome).

The overarching problem boils down to this: After Trapped's completion I walked out of the theater, figuratively shrugged my shoulders and wondered, 'well, just what was the point of that?' It was this same precise thought, I imagine, that made Columbia afraid to properly promote their film. If art imitates life with a modicum of substance, anything is fair game. But if art imitates life vacuously, forget about it. The cynics (however accurate) will instantly hop on the 'you're just exploiting calamity for commerce purposes!' bandwagon and it'll be a media shitstorm. Columbia simply didn't wanna have to deal.

Trapped's specious, trying-to-be-empowering message seems to be that even in the face of intense adversity, a tenacious couple can defeat their child's abductors, return their alive-and-well child to safety and live happily ever after. Why doesn't the screenwriter (Greg Iles, who adapted his own novel 24 Hours) try delivering that message to the parents and families of recently abducted, then murdered children Danielle van Dam, Cassandra Williams, and Samatha Runnion (the list goes on and on)? Truth is less pat than fiction. In real life, kidnappers don't play games, don't offer laborious exposition as to from what their evil is derived. Instead they pounce, then (frequently) rape, then quickly dispose of the body.

Only when Columbia &c. have the courage to make a film that truly embraces reality (however dark) will they have the guts--independent of current news headlines--to put their publicity money where their mouth is.

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