Movie Review: Carjacked (Blu-ray, 2011)

From the appearance of the cover, John Bonito’s thriller Carjacked looks like another thriller in the mold of some of the more effective auto themed suspense films like The Hitcher, Race with the Devil, Joyride and Duel - to name a few. Looks can be deceiving though.

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Maria Bello (A History of Violence) plays Lorraine, an abuse survivor, currently going through counseling, trying to put the pieces back together in her life – minus her violent husband. The number one thing in her life like most parents is her son so she’s determined to make things work. One night Lorraine and her son are out at the local mini-mart grabbing pizza rolls - among other assorted items - when they are joined at gun-point by Roy the bank-robber (Played by Stephen Dorf, Blade, The Gate).

Carjacked really starts out promising enough after a somewhat weak melodramatic set-up. Dorf and Bello are really solid actors and seem to do everything they can with the weak story they have to work with. Bello is pretty believable and her character changes nicely as she progresses through her terrifying journey, unfortunately Dorf is a little too restrained. There were several points were I just wanted Roy to just burst into a fury to amp up the suspense instead of trying to just accept Roy as a raging maniac with nothing to lose. It just doesn’t work.

There are a few sequences of note that, although predictable, put a little life in the sputtering feature's storyline. During one of Lorraine’s escapes from Roy she uses Binaca as a defense mechanism to blind him. It wasn’t effective to her escape, but I got a giggle. Anchor Bay has included one extra feature on the disc in the form of a behind-the-scenes featurette as well as the obligatory chapter selection.

Carjacked isn’t a bad film but it’s very routine in its execution. In the end the story almost feels like a Lifetime Channel production, minus the Activia commercials.