Ransom (1996)

After the light hearted movies of the 80s and before the more "important" works of the 2000s decade, director Ron Howard devoted the 1990s to quality blockbusters. Right after the great "Apollo 13" (1995), and using a straight-from-"Braveheart"-Mel Gibson, Howard gives in "Ransom" a typical Hollywood product, cutting straight into the juice of the movie right from the start, clearly marking heroes and villains, making heroes out of ordinary folks, and giving a very predictable all's-well-that-ends-well-ending. All this with an attempt at tension and fast pace (not that well achieved), but also trying to introduce a deeper emotional drama to the performances, due to the particular intensity of the story, which, aside from Gibson, is again not well achieved. We dive right into the story of Gibson, a millionaire airline mogul who may have done something illegal in his past (scene 1 makes that doubt flourish), married to Rene Russo, and whose son is soon kidnapped (scene 2). Scene 4 or 5 quickly give us that the kidnapper is corrupt cop Gary Sinise (good bad guy performance), and show us his gang (with the likes of Lili Taylor or Liev Schreiber), so there is no element of surprise in that (they could have held it a little longer, just for the tension, no?!). A ransom is demanded and so the movie follows basically all the commotion of Gibson and the police to try to track down the son. Halfway through the movie things appear to be at an end, with the transaction kid for money about to occur, but things go wrong and the chase is on again. The movie would fall in the same pattern all over again if Gibson's character didn't decide to take matters into his own hands and turn the game around, which produces some very interesting scenes and twists to the plot. But frankly, we know who the kidnapper is and where the kid is all along, and we know that this being a blockbuster all will turn out well in the end. The clever twists of the plot at the end may be clever for the characters, but not for the viewers, who know how the end will be like, but just don't know how the movie will get to it. So, most of the tension is dissolved in this screenwritting choice, and the audience doesn't much expect what will happen (for they already know, or at least very much suspect), but only how it will come about. Aside from that, Gibson is good as the man in search of revenge but with a soft family side (like his role on the most recent "Edge of Darkness" (2010)), Rene Russo cries a lot and is just there to pull some drama and tears out of the subject and Delroy Lindo is the smooth FBI agent on the job. An entertaining blockbuster with a strong human element, but which gets too long and predictable, because it lets the audience know everything, who then resign themselves to waiting for the characters to find out what they already know. The bad guys are caught and the bad deeds of Gibson's character, which help give some depth and an element of uncertainty to the beginning of the movie, are mysteriously forgotten, in good blockbuster-the-dad-is-a-hero-style.