Most of the studio comedies that get made these days are hybrid-comedies. Ghostbusters, horror-comedy; Central Intelligence, action-comedy; Ride Along 2, action-comedy; Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, horror-comedy. Even a box office dud like Keeping Up With the Joneses has a spy angle. Bad Moms is a rare exception to this rule — it made nearly $180 million on a $20 million budget, based on the chemistry of its three leads, Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, and Kathryn Hahn. Was it a particularly good movie? Not really, but sometimes it’s just fun to watch three people you like pal around for 90 minutes.
Amy Schumer, Goldie Hawn, Christopher Meloni, Wanda Sykes, and Randall Park are all people we like, and they all star in Snatched, which is probably an amusing comedy about a mother/daughter bonding trip in South America, right? Not quite. In Snatched, Schumer plays a recently jilted woman who convinces her uptight mother, played by Hawn, to go on vacation with her. There are very funny “whale cum” and vagina-cleaning jokes — par for the course for Schumer so far — and then they get kidnapped in the jungle.
That took a turn. Fortunately, despite the genre-clashing premise, Snatched has a lot going for it: the film was directed by Jonathan Levine (50/50) and written by Parks and Recreation all-star Katie Dippold (who also worked on Ghostbusters and The Heat), and Schumer and Hawn, who hasn’t been in a movie since 2002’s The Banger Sisters, have wonderful chemistry. Sometimes that’s all it takes for a good movie to become a great one.
