Amy Schumer's Snatched has fallen flat

The reviews are in for Amy Schumer’s latest screwball comedy ‘Snatched’ – but it appears that hauling in screen legend Goldie Hawn to play her mum hasn’t done the trick.

So far, the movie has the dubious honour of being her lowest-rated film on reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with a pretty dismal 35% approval rating from critics.

Her first major movie since 2015’s ‘Trainwreck’ (an 85% approval rating, FYI), it finds Schumer’s recently-dumped Emily taking her mother on an already booked trip to Ecuador.

Madcap capers ensue, but according to most critics, they’re not really up to snuff.

A.O. Scott in the New York Times muses: “It’s ultimately as complacent, self-absorbed and clueless as its heroine, and not always in an especially amusing way.”

Owen Gleiberman for Variety calls it ‘an aggressively cartoonish mother-daughter vacation-from-hell comedy that never strays far from the fractious, one-note surface’.

“You could say that there’s no harm in Amy Schumer doing a picture like this one, and maybe there isn’t, but she’s one of those actresses who has the potential to bring a rare full-bodied comic voice to movies. That’s a quality that shouldn’t get thrown overboard,” he warns.

Tom Huddleston in Time Out simply asks: “Can Amy Schumer play something other than a directionless, oversexed thirtysomething who drinks too much but learns a few valuable life lessons before the credits roll? Um, no.”

While on The Wrap, Robert Abele was similarly unimpressed.

“An uninspired, scattershot disaster romp that mostly serves the talents of one half of the marquee pairing, underuses the other half, and struggles to blend R-rated humor, foreign misadventure, and an oil-and-water mother-daughter dynamic,” he writes.

The reviews which give Schumer more credit are still pretty muted.

“A fitfully amusing, entirely disposable mother-daughter caper that’s elevated a notch by its gifted central duo and capable direction from Jonathan Levine,” writes Jon Frosch in The Hollywood Reporter.

That said, Scott Mendelson on Forbes calls it ‘one of the happiest surprises of the year’, so there’s one for the poster, while Matt Goldberg on Collider adds that it’s ‘a painfully funny comedy that has a good heart at its center’.

It’s due out in the UK on May 19.

Read more
Does Blade Runner 2049 trailer drop a massive spoiler?
Wonder Woman “exciting and entertaining”
Is Christopher Nolan producing Bond 25?