Kidnapping Mr Heineken

Synopsis: In 1983, a group of childhood friends - Cor (Jim Sturgess), Willem (Sam Worthington), Cat (Ryan Kwanten), Spikes (Mark van Eeuwen) and Brakes (Tom Cocquerel) -  kidnap Freddy Heineken (Anthony Hopkins) head of the Heineken beer empire and one of the richest men in the world. After grabbing Heineken  and his chauffeur in front of his Amsterdam townhouse, the gang walks away with the largest ransom ever paid for an individual kidnapping. But both their friendships and their perfect crime very quickly start to unravel.

Daniel Alfredson is well known for directing the second and third films in the Swedish originals of the ‘Millennium Trilogy’, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, but with those films he was working with entirely fictionalised characters and storylines. Here he seems hamstrung by the facts of the story and, despite a very enjoyable first act that’s high on energy, pace and style, the film bogs down once the gang get Heineken chained to the wall of their hideout and we shift into something that’s more an examination of characters and the way greed and rivalry can undermine the trust of long-standing friendships.

We’re introduced to the kidnappers at a point in their lives when, like many entrepreneurs of the eighties, their investments have gone pear shaped and they’re looking for a way to refinance their ambitions. When the bank says no, they simply decide to take what they think they’re entitled to. The very blokey cast brings a lot of posture and not much depth to their characters and it’s hard to find sympathy for this group of macho, selfish crooks and even Hopkins’ generically charming performance doesn’t give us much to like about Heineken who comes across as arrogant and duplicitous. The only ones we feel for are Corr’s long suffering, pregnant girlfriend (who is also Willem’s sister) Sonja (Jemima West) and Ab the driver (David Dencik), who feels the trauma of the kidnap much more than his boss, but he’s such a minor role that it doesn’t really give us much to hang on to.

The film suffers further from the fact that some key information, like how the cops got onto them, has never been released and, apart from some veiled hints at who might have turned them in, we’re left with a pretty unsatisfying climax that we simply wouldn’t accept in a fictionalised crime caper. This is not the first film to struggle with real life circumstances failing to provide a third act. David Fincher’s 2007 film, Zodiac comes to mind, but at least that had a much more complex and interesting set of characters for us to explore.

In the end, Kidnapping Mr Heineken seems to want to be a morality tale. Early on, Heineken tells the kidnappers that there are two kinds of rich people; those who have lots of money and those who have lots of friends, but that you can’t be both.  It’s an obvious maxim that, of course, proves to be true (and in case we missed that point, it’s repeated in voice-over at the end of the film) but it’s not enough to hold our interest for an hour and a half.

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