Kidnapping Mr Heineken

No one ever makes a movie about a successful kidnapping. And why would they? Something that goes exactly according to plan, even if the plan is ingenious or audacious, doesn’t necessarily make for riveting drama. No, complications or conflicts or just plain old cock-ups are far more compelling to watch. Well, most of the time maybe. There are complications and such galore in Kidnapping Mr Heineken, a dramatisation of the actual 1983 abduction of the titular Dutch billionaire beer baron, but that doesn’t make it that interesting a movie. It’s occasionally intriguing but mostly competent.

Still, it does benefit from having Anthony Hopkins as Heineken – the Oscar winner brings a nicely unpredictable quality to the role, whether he’s gently taunting or cleverly psyching out his captors, a band of semi-capable, semi-hapless crooks played by the likes of Sam Worthington (actually pretty good as the alpha-dog of the crew), Ryan Kwanten and Jim Sturgess. It’s too bad the film focuses more on the kidnappers and their lacklustre personal lives (one has kids, one has a kid on the way...that’s about all the info you’re gonna get).

Like Unbroken, Kidnapping Freddy Heineken reduces a lot of the truly cool stuff from its story to a postscript, such as the post-abduction career of two of the kidnappers or the way one kidnapper was tracked down by journalist Peter R de Vries (who wrote the book this movie is based upon). Those snippets of info at the end of the film intrigued me way more than anything in the preceding 90-or-so minutes.