Some Drivel On...Trapped

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to watch “Trapped” (2002) not long after watching “Apex” (reviewed Monday), two one-word titled Charlize Theron thrillers 24 years apart, providing an inadvertent if revealing window into the ebb and flow of the Hollywood middling thriller. In the former, Theron and Stuart Townsend star as Karen and Will Jennings, mother and father to young Abigail (Dakota Fanning) who is abducted by a trio of kidnappers (Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Pruitt Taylor Vince) that holds her for ransom. It suggests Joel Schumacher’s “Trespass” (2011) not just in its overtones of a home invasion thriller but more crucially, in its totally bonkers energy, epitomized in director Luis Mandoki’s overheated aesthetic and screenwriter Greg Iles’s commitment to kooky sensationalism much more than convincing characters. The kidnappers are set up as shrewd and thorough, only to come across as anything but, not that gaps in logic mean much. “You are here for the smoked meat,” the server said to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife when we went to Schwarz’s Deli in Montreal and if you watch “Trapped,” you are here for Courtney Love’s screw-is-loose performance, the You-Cannot-Be-Serious twist, and Will being introduced flying a seaplane all so he can land a seaplane on a highway during the car chase climax. I did not believe this climax, of course, but I did not believe it in the way one cannot believe, say, a Knicks 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. And so, while “Apex” was made in the indifference-inducing house style of Netflix, “Trapped” at least piques a perverse sense of curiosity that makes you want to watch if for no other reason than to wonder, “What’s this movie on about then?”