A preposterous thriller that survived bankruptcy gets into a high-speed pursuit on Netflix

We’ve been conditioned to believe any movie that’s spent years sitting on the shelf isn’t going to be very good, and while that’s an entirely accurate assumption in many cases, forgotten thriller Kidnap was placed on ice for reasons outside of its own control.

Director Luis Prieto’s far-fetched chase flick shot in late 2014, and was scheduled for a theatrical release in October of the following year. However, audiences didn’t get to see Halle Berry taking matters into her own hands until August 2017, after distributor Relativity Media went bankrupt before eventually selling off the distribution rights.

In the end, Kidnap didn’t quite manage to escape the stigma of the long-delayed curse by topping out with a Rotten Tomatoes score of only 35 percent, even if it did at least manage to earn close to $35 million at the box office on a $21 million budget. Proving that all B-tier thrillers are more than capable of living to fight another day, though, the absurd caper has been engaging in a hot pursuit up the Netflix viewership charts.

Per FlixPatrol, Kidnap has put the pedal to the metal and accelerated up the worldwide rankings, with plenty of at-home viewers keen to find out what happens when Berry’s single mother tries to single-handedly resolve the kidnapping of her young son by any means necessary, no matter the cost to either herself or those around her.

Things get increasingly silly as the story progresses, but that’s to be expected given the fantastical premise, though the Academy Award-winning lead is exactly as reliable as you’d expect when it comes to grounding the heightened material in some sense of reality.