EIFF Review: Secuestro Express

Posted by: Scott Hayes  •  August 5, 2005 @ 11:59am

Filed under: Reviews

In one of the opening sequences you get an overhead view of the city of Caracas, Venezuela. Ramshackle houses litter the hillsides surrounding the city, while nicer buildings rise up in the middle. You immediately get a sense of what life in this densely populated city must be like: desperate. All areas of crime are covered in this film including drug use, murder, thievery, rape, and of course, "secuestro" â€" kidnapping. For some it is easy money to abduct a rich kid and gain a ransom; a thriving business with a socioeconomic moral to it.

Carla and Martin are taken outside a nightclub by a gang of thugs. They experience a harrowing journey of fear and terror like what you would expect to occur.

This is a Miramax release, so I'm assuming it is one of the last cats out of the gate before Miramax goes Weinstein-free. It was produced by some of the people who brought us Sin City, so we know that there is some art to this tale, but mostly I just found this art to involve a lot of split-screening and sped-up shots.

This was a good, gripping story and it made me not want to visit Caracas any time soon. I wouldn't know who to trust.