Secuestro Express

Aroview: Venezuela comes off second best in this exploitative thriller peddling the country's professional kidnapping trade, where a couple of wealthy young hedonists are accosted and held to ransom by three unthinking thugs over an excruciating ten hour period.

Set amongst various dilapidated ghettos and slums, this uses poverty as a misguided social commentary on contemporary South America, where endemic lawlessness and corruption are matched only by the film's egregious fetish for sex, drugs, violence. Dir. Jakubowicz himself seems off his face, unable to restrain his compulsion for sub-Tarantino aesthetics and dorky student filmmaking trickery. Bawdy and high-strung, this nevertheless succeeds in part as an uncomfortable suspenser, where its kidnapping victims are rooted for through thick and thin given the worst-case-scenarios they're made to endure.

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