Secuestro Express aims to join the gritty masterful ranks of such similar visually exuberant and disturbing Latin American films as City of God and Amores Perros, but it's way overeager in style and content, turning a deadly serious topic into an unbelievably overwrought and muddle-headed drama. Writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz asks why abductions in South America occur so regularly, but his answer is simplistic, unconvincing, and troubling in its implications. Carla (Mía Maestro) and Martin (Jean Paul Leroux) are a young rich drug-addled couple who are taken hostage for ransom by street thugs Trece (Carlos Molina), Budu (Pedro Perez), and Niga (Carlos Madera). The characters are introduced with freeze-frame descriptions, a trite trick, made worse by turning these four- to five-word titles into the sole defining feature of each character. (Budu, listed as "rapist," spends the entire movie attempting to rape Carla.)
In one of the more ridiculous and disturbing sequences of the film, the group stops by the apartment of flamboyantly gay coke dealer Marcelo (Ehrman Ospina). After Martin hooks up with Marcelo (long story), he is ridiculed and the feminization of his character is used as a moral justification for having him killed later on. The treatment of Carla is similarly disturbing. While she is a more sympathetic character than Martin, she gets attacked for being a spoiled rich girl. Though she works at a community center, her abductors tell her that she will never know the struggles of the poor (true), and it becomes clear that they plan to execute her too. The actions of the abductors are horrendous, but there is a whiff of validity in the way they are portrayed, as if Carla deserves a scare to realize her ignorance of poverty.
The primary problem is that Secuestro Express isn't very well informed on the poor either. The lives and struggles of the abductors, the rationale for their actions, are never explained or dramatized besides a general need for cash. The degradation shown is so action movie over-the-top and shot through so many visual filters -- coke-fueled jump cuts and shaky hand-helds, close-up steady cam, even the old The Matrix freeze-frame pan around -- that reality is overwhelmed beyond recognition, obscured behind a tabloid approach to a story that could use a much more level-headed storyteller.