It's an odd mix of, well, stuff that just never quite comes together.

davidmvining

Adaptations are curious creatures. I mostly see them as things that shouldn't exist. It's not because I'm insistent that books are always better than movies (they're not), but that if a book is great, what makes it great is more than just story and character, but also how it's told on the page. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, though, is the exact kind of book that should be easy to adapt to screen. It's not full of lots of introspection or literary flourishes that would be difficult to adapt. It's a pretty straightforward adventure tale of a boy who comes into some property, gets shanghaied by his greedy uncle, escapes his ship-bound captivity with the help of a Jacobite, and has a journey through the Highlands that eventually takes him back to his uncle.

The problem for the adaptation, I think, was twofold. The first problem is that Kidnapped had no female lead, so there's no possibility of romance from the original story. That's a concern for many movie producers. The other is that the plot of the book is really about a boy getting his money, which feels like a low concern to some people. So, the producers, writer, and director decided to include the first half of Catriona, the sequel, into the adaptation. Now, I have yet to read Catriona, so I can't comment on the film's faithfulness, but I can comment on how the story feels so jumbled together.

I'm convinced that there's a line of thought in many writers' heads when they approach adaptations that just kill any sense of narrative. They want to include individual moments that either they or the audience of the original work love, so the story gets structured around these individual moments that end up taking the most amount of time with little left for the connective tissue between the events to give the story a sense of cohesion. It gets even worse when the writer tries to squeeze in so many events from multiple sources to bring in things like romance (which don't really fit) and play up what had been a background thematic element to the forefront.

The movie itself is fine. It sort of works. Caine is good as Breck. Lawrence Douglas is okay as David Balfour. The countryside is appropriate sumptuous, and the sets functional. As implied above, though, the story gets bogged down in tangents that ends up not feeling appropriate. David's quest to reclaim his property becomes a minor point in service to Breck's story of killing a Campbell, so we end up with this odd mix of a secondary character taking over the narrative, which throws off the whole focus of the story.

score 5/10

davidmvining 21 November 2019

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5272066/