- Actors: Angela Dixon, Nigel Whitmey, Rami Nasr, Velibor Topic, Lisa Eichhorn
- Director: Howard Ford
- Producers: Howard Ford, Laura Jane-Stephens, Amir Moallemi
- Disc Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
- Language: English
- Subtitles: French, English, Spanish
- Region: Region 1
- Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
- Rated: R
- Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
- DVD Release Date: August 22, 2017
- Run Time: 94 minutes
For those who
thought Kidnap was just a sillier
imitation of Taken, Never Let Go provides the same premise
with a new low of entertainment standards and logic. Comparisons to the plot
may be inevitable, but this film is so bad that it even makes the Taken sequels look like masterpieces by
comparison. Never Let Go is highly
melodramatic, full of ridiculously bad performances, and void of even a single
scene without faulty logic and contrived situations. It seems improbable that
there wouldn’t at least be one scene or element that accidentally works, but
this is easily the most incompetent filmmaking I have been forced to endure
this year.
The premise is
almost as simple as Kidnap, although
even the set-up feels contrived. Single mother Lisa Brennan (Angela Dixon)
inexplicably takes her newborn baby to Morocco, where the father is
supposed to meet her. The problem from the very beginning is the trouble liking
Lisa, who we soon discover had the baby with a politician named Clark Anderson
(Nigel Whitmey), who has a pregnant wife and a career endangered by his second
family. Perhaps this is why Lisa is on vacation with her infant, though it
never gives reason for her dangerous choice of location. Suspicious of even the
friendliest locals, it is surprising that Lisa is caught off guard long enough
for her baby to be stolen, but that is what inevitably happens.
Lisa immediately
springs into action, quickly killing a man that is simply carrying a melon in
the bag she believes has her child. The film quickly glosses over the fact that
a man that might be innocent is killed by our so-called hero, as her erratic
behavior is seen as a normal reaction from a protective parent. When the police
justifiably try to stop Lisa for the murder, she fights back against them also.
In one of the film’s most absurd early sequences, Lisa takes out a handful of
cops that all have guns drawn on her. It is unclear how this happens, because
the scene is shot in close-ups of her face rather than actually choreographing
any type of realistic fighting. Dixon
is unable to convince us that she would be capable of these extraordinary
feats, despite the film’s faulty reasoning that it is possible in the same way
that a mother might lift a car to save her child.
Armed with a gun
stolen from the police, Lisa goes on to injure several other innocent people on
her mission to find the people that have kidnapped her baby, even shooting a
café owner simply because he won’t let her use his telephone. But none of this
is addressed, and it is even implied that all of these crimes will be forgotten
once the police discover that her child really was stolen. Before we get to
that ridiculous resolution, however, we must spend most of the film’s laborious
94-minute run-time watching Lisa shrilly panic in a way that somehow
miraculously leads her to the villains.
The path of
destruction that this white woman leaves in her wake in her entitled mission to
get her child back is only overshadowed by the relentless depiction of men as evil.
The women characters that Lisa comes across inevitably believe and her in the
cause, while men are nearly all incompetent and villainous. This is further
solidified in a twist ending that everyone with half a brain should see coming
within the first 20-minutes. And this resolution comes with the rescue of
another child, one whose parents have been trying to find for months, despite
the initial premise and understanding of Lisa’s panic relying on the importance
of finding a child within hours of the abduction. As long as we get a shoddy
final scene of a toddler walking towards two actors he clearly knows are not
his actual parents. This movie isn’t just bad; it’s painful.
The DVD release
has no special features, which is fitting, as there is nothing special about
this film beyond the level of incompetence across every aspect of the
production.
Entertainment Value:
2/10
Quality of
Filmmaking: 1/10
Historical
Significance: 0/10
Special Features: 0/10
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