Review of Kidnapping Mr. Heineken (2015) by Dylan D — 17 Apr 2015

As tedious as being imprisoned for several weeks. How a crime drama with such good cast can be so dull is borderline a crime. The actors are good, but the characters they play have the personality of barren unsympathetic schmucks. The screenplay and conversation are dry, primarily dabbling in curses and complaints for nearly the entire movie. While there are clearly a couple of good moments by the actors, they are too few to sustain interest for the rest of boring banters.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken is exactly what it advertises, the story of five men who are down on their luck and decide to snatch a billionaire in hope for monetary gain. It's amazing that none of these five characters is even close to being relatable. The movie tries to depict individuals who are pushed to do illegal things by the circumstance, yet they are all manipulative, aggressive and severely lacking empathy.

At latter half they are even interchangeable since everyone has a knack for whining, in exception of Sam Worthington's character who surprises audience with poor and crazy decisions. Probably the best decision the movie did was to put Anthony Hopkins as Heineken in a box and let him do a few monologues. Still, there is no tangible connection between Heineken and the kidnappers, there's not even connection between the kidnappers themselves. When the movie tries to pull friendship theme, it only makes things more awkward.

For action crime, one would expect an intelligent plot, perhaps major twists and thought out plans, sadly there's a barely any level of sophistication here as five of them partially wing it and hope for the best. In fact, most of the times they are just fooling around, laughing annoyingly and verbally abusing each other. As for action scenes, majority of TV shows will offer more than this movie.

The film offers the shallow sense of helplessness and uneasiness as audience watch five aversive men threatening an old man for money and bicker with each other.