A politician’s daughter hires people to kidnap her in a bid for attention but her dad was all like, “Yay! She was nothing but trouble anyway and I’ll win the next election with the sympathy vote.”
Anyone know/remember?
That was part of Escape From L.A., sort of.
Excess Baggage starring ASLicia Silverstone, Harry Connick Jr, Benicio Del Toro and Christopher Walken?
That’s it BurnMeUp. Thank you! Now I can tell my son his idea for an original script isn’t so original. I knew I saw something like it ages ago.
Its a variation on The Ransom of Red Chief. There are multiple movies that play around with the theme.
There’s a twist on a similar plot in “Spartan”: the daughter of the president is kidnapped for white slavery, and the kidnappers aren’t aware of who she is.
RUTHLESS PEOPLE takes the cake, where the whole gag was that the rich businessman had planned to murder his just-got-kidnapped wife, and in best Danny DeVito fashion pops open the champagne and cheerfully keeps failing to meet their demands.
“I’m being marked DOWN? I’ve been kidnapped by K-Mart!”
The fourth and fifth seasons of Weeds touched on this, when a Mexican drug cartel kidnaps Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) and rapidly discovers that nobody is willing to pay anything for her return.
Go easy on the kid. Everything is derivative!
And the twist is that a story comes out that the president’s daughter and her college professor were found drowned. I.e. - the prez was writing his daughter off as gone and taking advantage of the political sympathy. But she turned out to be not quite so dead (not to spoil the movie).
Good flick, though. Mamet. I think there are only about 20 lines in the whole movie, but the characters repeat themselves and each other so often the rest of the film is filled out with dialogue.
I agree, there haven’t been any truly original story ideas since the Theatre of Dionysus. And even those were probably copied from an earlier, lost source.
What can be original is how the story idea is presented. I’d encourage him to keep writing, see what he comes up with.
If you’re looking for a movie featuring both Kurt Russell and Bruce Campbell (and, as a bonus, Mary Elizabeth Winstead!), Sky High is so much better than Escape. I had no choice, though. Escape was the in-flight movie on a trans-Pacific flight and I could just walk off the plane.
I feel compelled to mention that The Boy is a 29 year old man. He became The Boy to differentiate him from his twin sister. It’s funny because we no longer call her The Girl, but The Boy stuck.
Wow. I’ve never met a superhero before!