Avis des critiques

Propulsive entertainment - set in a car, with the windshield as wide-screen canvas - so it's easy to ignore the fact that the plot has no ingenious twists (the one at the very end seems contrived) and the characters barely develop at all (the sole female character is especially ill-served, looking like she's going to be the film's ace in the hole but ending up merely hysterical).

Kidnapped features some inserts shot later by the filmmaker's son, writer/director Lamberto Bava, while omitting the quietly devastating shot that endsRabid Dogs. But in any version it's a rare and gut-wrenching white-knuckle thriller whose final twist is a knife through the heart.

Left unfinished due to bankruptcy and seized by the Italian government until the mid 1990s, when Bava's son finished the film with help from producer Alfredo Leone, Kidnapped feels more aggressive than any other Bava work, and strikes me as his most unforgiving and naked film, doing away with the visual embellishments, the niceties of fiction that had dominated his now rightly heralded style, and letting the skeletal remains speak for themselves.