Seeing that this movie was directed by Ron Howard gave me some good hopes about this movie. I've seen "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind" and loved both. I even appreciated "Edtv", so I was convinced that this movie would be yet another hit. But I was wrong. I'm not saying that it was a bad movie, but it wasn't a really good one either. It really left me with a double feeling, but more about that later on.
First I'll tell you something more about the story. The movie is about Tom Mullen, a successful airline owner and the father of a kidnapped boy. Sean Mullen was kidnapped and taken as a hostage for a ransom of two million dollar. But when the drop goes wrong, the business man in Tom takes it over from the father. To everybody's astonishment and horror, he turns the tables on the leader of the kidnappers by turning the ransom money into a bounty for the man's head in the TV news...
At first this looked like an ordinary Hollywood production about a kidnapping. Nothing special, but no TV-movie material either. But as soon as he puts that bounty on the kidnapper's head, it all went wrong in my opinion. I can't believe that there is any parent that would ever do such a thing. Jeopardising the life of your child is probably the last thing that you want to do and I'm sure that the police would never let it happen. And that's not the only problem that I had with the movie. The final of the movie didn't add much to the believability either. I'm not going to tell you the details, but it involves a lot of shooting and other action shots.
Still not everything about the movie was bad. Mel Gibson's and Rene Russo's performances weren't bad, but in my opinion it was Gary Sinise who was the best actor in this movie. The role he had to play as Detective Jimmy Shaker certainly wasn't the easiest one (again I can not tell you too much about it without giving away too much information), but he did it very well.
All in all this is movie that left me behind with a double feeling. It started well and the acting is OK, but the second half really blew it for me. That's why I give this movie a 6/10.
First I'll tell you something more about the story. The movie is about Tom Mullen, a successful airline owner and the father of a kidnapped boy. Sean Mullen was kidnapped and taken as a hostage for a ransom of two million dollar. But when the drop goes wrong, the business man in Tom takes it over from the father. To everybody's astonishment and horror, he turns the tables on the leader of the kidnappers by turning the ransom money into a bounty for the man's head in the TV news...
At first this looked like an ordinary Hollywood production about a kidnapping. Nothing special, but no TV-movie material either. But as soon as he puts that bounty on the kidnapper's head, it all went wrong in my opinion. I can't believe that there is any parent that would ever do such a thing. Jeopardising the life of your child is probably the last thing that you want to do and I'm sure that the police would never let it happen. And that's not the only problem that I had with the movie. The final of the movie didn't add much to the believability either. I'm not going to tell you the details, but it involves a lot of shooting and other action shots.
Still not everything about the movie was bad. Mel Gibson's and Rene Russo's performances weren't bad, but in my opinion it was Gary Sinise who was the best actor in this movie. The role he had to play as Detective Jimmy Shaker certainly wasn't the easiest one (again I can not tell you too much about it without giving away too much information), but he did it very well.
All in all this is movie that left me behind with a double feeling. It started well and the acting is OK, but the second half really blew it for me. That's why I give this movie a 6/10.