Somebody stole her husband

>> Meg Ryan looks to Russell Crowe for Proof of Life

by MARK SLUTSKY

Kidnapping and/or hostage scenarios have made for some damn fun movies. Think Dog Day Afternoon, Ransom or The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Thus the new Meg Ryan/Russell Crowe movie, Proof of Life, offers the promise of some nasty, easily despicable captors, people in distress and a sweaty-palm climax.

In terms of its general framework, Proof of Life delivers on these expectations. David Morse, as an American engineer, faces horrific conditions after being kidnapped by Colombian renegades. Meg Ryan is his distraught wife, who realizes the only person who really knows what he's doing is K&R expert Russell Crowe. K&R, we learn, stands for Kidnap and Ransom, something which has become increasingly common in developing nations as desperate natives realize there are big bucks to be made by holding rich whiteys for fat ransoms (the things you learn while at the movies!).

The plot, inspired in part by an article on the phenom that appeared in Vanity Fair, thickens when Ryan learns her husband's corporate bosses cancelled his K&R insurance, meaning they can't afford Crowe. She begs him to stay, and in a fit of conscientious behaviour only ever witnessed in movies, he leaves but returns to work for her (presumably for a cut rate). Predictably, the two are caught up in an emotional situation and find themselves drawn to one another.

Crowe is reasonably believable as the top-drawer K&R guy. Ryan, however, supplies this film with its principle problem. She's simply never very believable in Proof of Life. She cries a bit, but telling by the emotional depth she musters, managed all her tears through glycerin drops. It's a tricky emotional state, for sure, one that Sissy Spacek handled so well in Missing, the '82 film about a distraught wife and her father-in-law searching for the man they both love. Spacek played a mature and intelligent woman who nonetheless was losing it in the face of unfeeling bureaucrats and the trauma of not knowing what was going on.

Ryan has none of this going on, looking instead like she's under the mistaken impression that she's appearing in You've Got a Kidnapped Husband, the sequel to You've Got Mail. Thus the film's central emotional line is thoroughly undermined, making all those guns and that nifty premise much ado about nothing.

One final casting note: a corporate sleazebag in the film is played by an actor I don't believe I've ever seen before. In an odd and presumably unintentional bit of casting, the actor (whose name is not cited on the film's press notes for some reason) looks and sounds strikingly like George W. Bush. In what is undoubtedly the best bit of unintentionally double-entendre-laden dialogue, at one point this corporate creep tells Ryan that he's working on a "transition team" that will help retrieve her husband. Double dipped in the residue of the ongoing American election, the utter and complete sleaze of that talentless, 50-faced idiot Dubya can't help but enhance this actor's depiction of a truly bad guy by many a mile.

Proof of Life opens Friday, Dec. 8