Ransom

Under the aegis of Disney subsidiary, Touchstone Pictures, Ron Howard delivers a slick mainstream thriller that wraps its formulaic nature in A-grade production values and serves it up with more than a little directorial heavy-handedness.

In a remake of a 1956 film starring Glenn Ford,  Mel Gibson plays Tom Mullen an airline tycoon whose young son (Brawley Nolte, son of Nick Nolte) is kidnapped. His wife (Rene Russo) insists on him calling in the FBI but they bungle the case and Tom decides to take matters into his  own hands. The script by Richard Price and Alexander Ignon early on establishes Tom as a maverick (he even wears a ten gallon hat!) a quality which is key to the narrative dynamic – the battle between two alpha males, Tom as the (essentially) good guy versus the kidnapper (Gary Sinise) as the (very) bad guy. With casting like this there are no surprises how things going to turn out but the plot is by-and-large involving and Howard keeps the tension wound tight.

Unfortunately whilst the kidnapping story is resolved in the first 100 minutes or so the film continues on with the battle between the two men. The “double climax” technique is one that rarely works and doesn’t do so here. Gibson has by this time exhausted his emotional repertoire and whilst Sinise makes for a compelling villain, particularly as his motivation is never convincingly established (he appears to have some kind of pathological hatred of the rich) this is largely repetitious and, at times, unintentionally self-parodising. The rest of the cast fill out the story well although you’d have to say the bad guys are better served by the script with Lili Taylor outshining Rene Russo’s weepy wife/mother and LIndo little more than a stock figure.

Ransom is a text-book example of Hollywood multiplex entertainment and stands, or falls,as such. 

 

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