Movie Review: Snatched and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword: New at Reason

How you feel about Snatched will probably depend on how you feel about Amy Schumer at this point. Did you love her in Trainwreck? Were you then puzzled by the awkward misfire of her Netflix special a few months back? Is she now the new Anne Hathaway, a once-beloved female performer suddenly judged by the entertainment media to have exceeded her sell-by date? Hathaway has bounced back from that ritual drubbing; can Schumer do it, too?

Snatched seems unpromising in bare outline. A mouthy, abrasive woman named Emily (Schumer), stuck with a pair of nonrefundable plane tickets after being dumped by her boyfriend, persuades her agoraphobic mom, Linda (Goldie Hawn), to join her on a vacation in Ecuador. Together, these two well-off white women venture down among the brown peoples of the Amazon Basin, and the high-end tourist resorts in which many of them—those not engaged in terrorist activities at any rate—are employed. Risks are taken (mother and daughter put their trust in a dubious hunk), adventures are had (they get kidnapped), and at the end of a brisk 90 minutes, a little potted lesson about the Important Things in Life is learned.

Sounds like a hard pass, right? And yet Snatched is in fact a funny movie, writes Kurt Loder.

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