Here Lies TRAPPED
So how many of you have seen Trapped? Raise your hands ... anyone? Anybody? Okay, for those of you who haven't seen the film, how many of you know that it is now showing in theaters? Anybody know the plot? Anybody know who stars in it? Hmmmm ... if you find yourself not raising your hand to a lot of these questions, it's no surprise. Trapped is a thriller with a somewhat high level cast ... Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Charlize Theron among them.
It's showing at your local multiplex most likely, but I bet a lot of you don't even know about it, and probably wouldn't know about it until you showed up at the theater. In a bizarre bit of studio anti-promotion, the studio releasing Trapped, Columbia Pictures and Mandolin Entertainment, decided to essentially bury this film by providing no promotion, no advance viewings for critics, nothing ... because the subject matter of this film, the kidnapping of a child, happens to come at a time when child kidnappings are happening quite frequently in the news.
I am not here to criticize Columbia and Mandolin outright for making this decision ... but I simply want to express concern in general. This certainly isn't the first time that a studio has delayed or buried a film because its subject matter ends up coming at an unfortunate time. The most recent example of this was all the shifting in release dates and limited promotion for films like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage right after the September 11 tragedies of last year. But the situation with Trapped is extremely strange ... why didn't the studio just delay the film instead of going ahead with its planned release date and effectively let it die immediately from a lack of any promotion? I haven't seen one preview trailer for the film, and if I didn't follow film so closely, I'm sure that one might have just escaped past me, as I imagine it will do for most people. And it shows at the boxoffice ... it will most likely exit theaters in a couple of weeks.
Whether the film is good or not is not relevant in this case (in the few reviews I have read, critics are mostly disappointed in this one). The premise of this thriller involves a kidnapper who appears to come up with a clever scheme. He kidnaps a young girl, played by Dakota Fanning, and then he keeps the girl's mother under control, while a female accomplice of his attempts to get the ransom from the father. Luis Mandoki directed the film.
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