Review: 'Stolen' Doesn't Exactly Steal The Show

With its generic premise and sadly written script, it's not quite surprising how Simon West's Stolen - cliche approaching - doesn't exactly steal the show. The setup is pretty simple and stolen, in which Nicholas Cage, in one of his dull and tiresome performances, play as Will Montgomery, an expert thief who, eight years after a heist gone bad, sets out to get his daughter Alison (Sami Gayle, Detachment) held captive by his former accomplice and friend Vincent Kingsley (Josh Lucas). Captor demands ten million dollars in the next twelve hours.

By now, one will deduce that this setup, in truth, rings a bell. Fly through the pages of your thesaurus at home, browse through letter 's' and find the word Stolen and you'll find Taken. The movie's hackneyed (if not stolen) plot is of course modified an escape to a case called copyright infringement. But this aside, the movie is less unabashed, less violent and less effective - damn, this movie is a toned down version of Taken. It's not quite right to compare, but it's hard not to. Liam Neeson's Taken is arguably a better pick, if we're talking paternal angst and car chases and foot chases and all, because simply, Nic Cage's version seem to have very little of these - father-and-daughter relationship seems to be dramatically underwhelming even with the low norm that the genre requires, the violence feels short and logic seem to disappear every now and again for irregular intervals.

Simon West's (The Expendables 2, The Mechanic) taste in stunts are quite neat, but it doesn't aid the fact that the movie's scribe David Guggenheim (Safe House) seem to have lost faith in logic. Lucas' performance as the demented kidnapper is a little too sharp, but all the while, serviceable; Silk Spectre from Watchmen (Malin Akerman) is here to give a nice and easy feel to the screen. The fun element here is the hysterics of a pair of FBI overthinkers (played ludicrously well by Danny Huston and Mark Valley) who, somehow, attached to this obsession on Will. They are lousy FBI agents, albeit in this uneven of a heist-thriller, they would come up with smart ideas to be at least a step closer to the badly-groomed Montgomery.

The movie is practically a jumble of things, a scattershot fusing of haphazardly picked tired ideas that only make for a movie that feels like a copycat, rather than appreciating the few merits that it owns. The movie, running on a short time of ninety minutes, is watchable, an experience as though to have just dropped by.

VERDICT: C+