Ransom (1996)

 

Director: Ron Howard

Screenplay: Richard Price and Alexander Ignon

Cast: Mel Gibson as Tom Mullen; Rene Russo as Kate Mullen; Brawley Nolte as Sean Mullen; Gary Sinise as Det. Jimmy Shaker; Delroy Lindo as Agent Lonnie Hawkins; Lili Taylor as Maris Conner; Liev Schreiber as Clark Barnes; Donnie Wahlberg as Cubby Barnes; Evan Handler as Miles Roberts

Ephemeral Waves

 

You look better than those frogs in that beer commercial!

Time passes, and what was once the mainstream is now decades old and of a different time. Such is the case with this Ron Howard film from when DVDs were new...

Everything in Random on the surface would continue in the modern day. Even when cinema changed to big budget films, especially in the superhero genre, and few moderate budget productions were made, we still got an alternative or two which throwback to these types of thrillers once in a while. The touches and content here however are very different even just two decades afterwards. The old DVD, when this was released, advertised how Ron Howard was the director of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (2000), a juxtaposition to try to sell the film to a buyer if any, which emphasises how eclectic some directors are. That this was a film where Mel Gibson was once a huge star without any controversy is itself of another era, front and centre of a different era.

Once ago Gibson was a huge star off the back of the likes of the Lethal Weapon series, and even an admired artist as he also directed films, Ransom a year after Braveheart (1995) where, as a director, he would get the Best Picture Oscar at the 68th Academy Awards. Then however were two certain incidents which tarred his reputation. In 2006, intoxicated and being pulled over by the police for driving under the influence, he made anti-Semitic and sexist comments during the arrest. Then in 2010, when a threatening call to his then-partner Oksana Grigorieva including racist language came to be, and came to public light. He was cancelled back before that term was even popular, only in the 2010s coming back to cinema fully but never the same huge star as before.

Some things have not changed, such as a lack of subtlety when one of the first shots in the film is an ominous cut to a bare bed in a bare room with handcuffs being attached. Ransom, about a man whose child is kidnapped and eventually puts out a bounty with the negotiation money, is not an original premise, based on a 1954 episode of The United States Steel Hour titled Fearful Decision, adapted into a 1956 film Ransom! starring Leslie Nielsen. Shot in New York City, Ransom definitely has a bit more grit, with a liberal use of the word "fuck", but also its own sense of the absurd to undercut this tone, such as an over elaborate original trade for the kidnapping of Gibson's son, involving jumping into a pool to get keys in a gym, answering a phone in a gym locker, redressing and so forth in a style without real life making such ideas difficult to ever actually work.

Ransom does have a moral complexity. At first it is a simple kidnapping plot, where Gibson's Tom Mullen, a multi-millionaire airplane company boss, is simply having to deal with a plot created by Det. Jimmy Shaker (Gary Sinise), a police officer with his love interest Maris (Lili Taylor) and two hired hands (Liev Schreiber and Donnie Wahlberg) who are brothers. Mullen is proven more complex, including the controversy that he did bribe someone to end a strike, a controversy that has dogged his family beforehand and he eventually admits to in closed doors to the FBI fearing it is the cause of this kidnapping. This is almost attempting to be like High and Low (1963), Akira Kurosawa's crime film where a kidnapping a rich man's son exposes the hypocrisy of the richer family, only adding a new factor where, at his breaking point, Mullen finally puts the ransom money up as a bounty instead with everyone else, the FBI to his wife (Rene Russo) trying to convince him to retract it. Even the media themselves are a factor as, already a publicity target, they eventually trail his care during an attempted trade at one point until he takes advantage of it.

The result becomes more between a man in a system, deciding to up a bounty, or a renegade in which the old action cliché of a man having his own form of justice transpire whilst everyone else is stumbling around him, in various psychological states, trying to tell him why this is wrong. It is handicapped by Gibson in the lead, not the actor himself but his status. He is in spite of his problematic history and opinions a great actor, and when Rene Russo is stuck with a generic housewife is distress role, he almost overcomes the moral problem of sympathising with a rich man over working class kidnappers due to the quality of his performance, that he conveys that he is both a rich white man versus the working class with all the muddiness of his behaviour complicating things, but is a man cruelly having had his son snatched away. The problem is that the film still has to sell him as the hero, when Gibson should have always been a character actor where he could have the film gain more moral greyness, or been allowed to direct Ransom himself, when he would have gone for greater risk due to the carte blanche he had access to.

It is neither helped the film is in a schism. Mullen is still the hero, against working class kidnappers, his rich home contrasted by their dingy apartment, blaring industrial metal to deafen their kidnap victim. (Which is composed by Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins of all people.) An attempt is made to rectify the surface biases, in that the kidnappers are pawns, one trying his best to help the boy they have kidnapped, and that his older brother and Mavis despite being willing to even kill the hostage are still stuck in the same place as he is. The real villain is Sinise's Shaker, but we have either a figure you think can exist or a cartoonish portrayal. The debate the film wants either way is a straw man argument because Shaker is a pure psychopath, with the added factor that, with few viewers even suffer having a loved one kidnapped, the cogs of an event like this in real life feel glossed over in terms of potential coincidences and turns of event. Ones as well which could have added to the good moments in this film, which are visibly found, and made it greater.

Ron Howard also indulges in action aesthetic too despite this being a thriller, like one of the kidnappers on a quad bike being pursued by helicopters in a quarry, which does not help. Even the attempt at a class war subtext is lost when the film tries for it. Shaker makes an odd reference, disguising his voice in phone calls to Mullen, to the George Pal 1960 adaptation of The Time Machine, comparing himself and the working class to Morlocks, and Mullen to the Eloi. It becomes confusing. Instead, the metaphor works unintentionally in the production itself. Gibson is great, but he is above a glass ceiling here as the marquee actor with Russo, a figure who became immensely popular in large roles in the nineties only to have a period of inaction from 2005 to 2011. Below the glass ceiling are all the recognisable character actors who make the film interesting at least. Sinise himself, or Lili Taylor or Delroy Lindo as an FBI agent, even Dan Hedaya as Jackie Brown, who is in one single scene as the man Mullen bribed off and went to prison for, still stealing the moment nonetheless when he is angry at Mullen's appearance at the prison.

Ransom never really gels, despite all the good pieces, always with something unsubtle or the machinations not working, like suddenly having a scene in a dilapidated church looking of a Gothic horror film and the wrong tone, or urban New York City never really being explored despite one of its co-writers, author Richard Price, having a reputation in his own literature and his screenplays of tackling urban crime stories. Even when an intriguing touch or so is found, such as the mirroring of two obsessed and psychologically on edge men with two women in their lives trying to steer them to sanity, it never gets there. It is a film noir at heart, but in an action film bombast dress - more bombastic, less shadows and more elaborate camera swoops - when that older style would have been more psychologically perfect. Even the High and Low comparison is zilch as Kurosawa did not end his film with a fight scene in the middle of a busy street with people going through a light store window. Ron Howard would never return to this genre again after Ransom, a curious misfiring one-off left in his filmography as a result.