Film review: The Kidnapping of Mr Heineken

The film tells the true story of one of Holland’s most infamous crimes – the 1983 kidnapping of the brewery billionaire Freddy Heineken and his driver.

Anthony Hopkins in The Kidnapping Mr. Heineken. Courtesy European Film Company

The Kidnapping of Mr Heineken

Director: Daniel Alfredson

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Sam Worthington, Jim Sturgess

Three stars

The Kidnapping of Mr Heineken tells the true story of one of Holland's most infamous crimes – the 1983 kidnapping of the brewery billionaire Freddy Heineken and his driver.

The film is based on the 1987 book, De ontvoering van Alfred Heineken, by the journalist Peter De Vries, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The star turn comes from Anthony Hopkins, in the title role, whose pedigree playing parts that require him to spend almost the entire film locked in a cell is surely unrivalled.

This script doesn't offer him enough to raise his performance to The Silence of the Lambs levels, but he is still a high point in this enjoyable, if unremarkable, kidnap caper.

The leaders of the kidnappers, Cor Van Hout and Willem Holleeder, are capably played by Jim Sturgess (Cloud Atlas) and Sam Worthington, who swaps a starring role in the world's most expensive movie (Avatar) for a supporting role in a low-budget Euro crime flick.

The film opens with our anti-heroes bankrupt and failing to obtain a bank loan to revive their ailing business interests. Their attempts to forcibly evict a group of squatters from their only remaining asset provides a hint that they may not be the most loveable types, and the plot to extract a 35 million guilders (Dh65m) ransom for the brewing tycoon is born.

A bank heist to fund the gang’s plan, followed by the kidnapping itself, get the action out of the way early and the remainder of the film focuses on the fracturing relationships within the gang as the hostage situation unexpectedly drags on for weeks, and on Heineken’s response to his imprisonment and captors.

Unusually, the director Daniel Alfredson chooses to tell the whole story purely from the kidnappers’ perspective. This sets the film apart from most other kidnap movies, in that we avoid the clichés of watching the police slowly piece the puzzle together and close in on the villains, though this break from convention may ultimately work against the movie, too. The audience is left just as much in the dark as the kidnappers and never really knows how close, if at all, the police are to tracking them down. The technique is interesting, but leaves a sense of “what just happened there?” as the movie comes to its denouement and we don’t know how or why it got there.

The deteriorating relationships between the gang members as the stress of hiding out with their hostage are entertaining to watch, but none of the kidnappers are really loveable-enough rogues for us to want them to succeed, nor nasty enough villains for us to want them to fail.

If you drew a "kidnap movie" straight line from the bumbling buffoons of Ruthless People through to the disturbing psychosis of Misery, this would sit exactly in the middle, in a kind of kidnapping suburbia where the villains decorate their victims’ cells with furniture from Ikea, and take requests on what music to play on the in-cell stereo.

There’s plenty to like about the film, not least Hopkins’ performance – which is typically stellar despite him only being on screen for about 15 minutes – and Sturgess’s facial hair, which is a dead cert for the "Best 80s Moustache" Oscar next year.

But if Alfredson ever attempts another kidnap caper that neither plays it for laughs nor overdoes brutality, he could do worse than watch Fargo to see how it should be done.