Movie review: Kidnapping Mr Heineken

A scene from Kidnapping Mr Heineken. Photo / Supplied

A good kidnapping requires clever design, meticulous planning and a magician's sense of timing; so does a good kidnapping film. This isn't one.

An independent and modestly budgeted version of the story of the 1983 abduction of a Dutch beer magnate, it manages to be simultaneously predictable and perplexing.

The kidnap-ransom-capture story is entirely devoid of suspense, much less the kind of zinger twist (see The Edukators, The Disappearance of Alice Creed and the recent Life of Crime) that the genre demands.

Fatally, there is no character we care about, largely because we are never given the chance. The film jumps without warning from scene to scene, never adopting a narrative viewpoint and leaving questions scattered in its wake.

A newly pregnant woman shows only occasional interest in where her boyfriend goes all night; an accidental gunshot through an apartment ceiling goes unremarked on; in one of the most laughable moments, two of the kidnappers, dodgy-looking unshaven guys in leather jackets and beanies, are stopped at a police roadblock and ... waved through.

Meanwhile, the all-Dutch gang sports a melange of accents (Sam Worthington, as the son of a long-time Heineken employee who loves the boss even though he axed his job, sounds about as Dutch as Paul Hogan); they speak English, while saying they are speaking German and reading papers written in Dutch.

Watch: Trailer for Kidnapping Mr Heineken

In adapting the work of crime journalist Peter R De Vries, screenwriter William Brookfield, (perhaps by contractual obligation) shows dogged loyalty to the facts, but it is at the expense of dramatic impact.

A crime that took two years to plan comes across as an off-the-cuff idea by some cash-strapped builders. The pace of the film is all wrong: there's no tension before the snatching and little after it.

Time and again, good material is introduced and discarded: Anthony Hopkins would have relished the chance to work with the hint the script gives of Heineken's scornfulness or his dandyish vanity, but the ideas are snatched away. No wonder he looks so pissed off.

Daniel Alfredson, who directed the second two of the Swedish films based on Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, should have had the smarts to foil this conspiracy at the planning stages.

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jim Sturgess, Sam Worthington, Ryan Kwanten, Mark van Eeuwen, Tom Cocquerel, Jemima West
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Running time: 93 mins
Rating: M (content may disturb)
Verdict: Predictable yet perplexing and devoid of suspense

- TimeOut