DVD Ransom (Special Edition)

Gibson is cast as wealthy airline owner Tom Mullen, living a picture-perfect life in New York City with his wife Kate (Rene Russo) and young son Sean (Brawley Nolte). All is as it should be until Sean is kidnapped from a science fair in Central Park, leaving Tom and Kate distraught and feeling helpless. Despite the kidnapper's warning that there be no police or law officials involved, Tom turns to the FBI, believing that this crime against him may have a connection to a payoff he made that landed gangster Jackie Brown in prison (the motivation behind the crime is never really cemented, but passed off as jealous rage for Tom's avoidance of prison for said payoff).

On the opposite end of the threatening phone calls and emails is detective Jimmy Baker (Gary Sinise), his girlfriend Maris (Lili Taylor), hacker whiz Miles (Evan Handler), and brothers Clark and Cubby Barnes (Liev Schreiber and Donnie Wahlberg). They make a demand of two millions dollars in return for the safe delivery of Tom's son, which Tom agrees to pay at the behest of Kate and the FBI officials assigned to the case.

To this day, I don't know why filmmakers even bother to include an FBI subplot in any crime thriller, given their obvious failures and mishaps in movies stretching back as far as time itself. Take, for instance, the scene in which Tom leaves to deliver the money in return for the address where his son is located. When he arrives for the exchange with Cubby, who has told his brother he will not deliver the money until Baker delivers Tom's son, the FBI helicopters fill the night sky and ruin what would have been a successful payoff. Only after this incident does it ever occur to them that there might be more than one person involved in the kidnapping.

I also think the movie would benefit from keeping the identity of Sinise's character a secret until a sufficient point much later in the film, perhaps when he alerts the police to the boy's whereabouts. The presence of his fellow kidnappers is more than enough to suffice the mystery of his identity; it just seems like the old unknown mastermind plot twist would serve the movie better than knowing upfront.

And that's an even bigger problem, considering that the identity of this character is intrical to the effectiveness of the movie's turn of events, in which Tom turns his promised delivery of the ransom money into a bounty for the kidnappers' identities, provided they are captured and positively identified as such, of course. Risking his son's life and the disapproval from his wife, he dives into a dangerous mind game in which he challenges his son's captors to come clean without their expected reward, and despite the fact that we can predict how this plot twist will eventually end up, there is still a great deal of tension resonating from this psychological battle of the minds.

In addition to the high level of suspense, this thriller is armed with a sure-fire cast that hits all the right notes in all the right places. Tom's devotion to his son, as well as his wanting for nothing more than his safe return, is beautifully acted by Gibson, who delivers lines like "Give me back my son!" with a sublime mixture of fear and anger. Russo also receives high marks as a mother driven mad by all that's going on around her, and her scenes involving fits of anger and fright are hard-hitting and realistically acted. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Sinise portrays Baker's gradual breakdown with savage brutality, becoming more than just an ordinary movie villain. As the quartet of kidnappers, Taylor, Handler, Schreiber and Wahlberg each have moments where they shine.

Overall, I liked "Ransom." I enjoyed its ability to keep me on edge while waiting for a plot twist I saw coming a mile away; I greatly enjoyed watching a wonderful cast exercising their most extreme talent; most of all, I relished the tension that centers on the mind game Tom engages in with those who wish to do his son harm. As much as I enjoyed it, I wonder how the movie would fare if Baker's identity as the mastermind were kept a secret, and whether or not the absence of the FBI from the story would make much of a difference; maybe we'll never know.