Lisa Brennan (Angela Dixon) has decided to take a vacation away from her United States home, and the affair she had with a political candidate, Clark Anderson (Nigel Whitmey), more importantly, by taking their baby daughter to North African climes. The weather is good, the food is exotic, the beaches are welcoming, so this seems the perfect place to get her head straight (she is on medication for depression) but what she did not count on was the statistic about how many children are abducted each year, and from this region too. So when she is on the aforementioned beach and trying to relax, she is unprepared to be scammed by a gang who kidnap the infant - but what they don't count on is that she will never give up.
Never Let Go was another film from writer and director Howard J. Ford that saw him eschew the easy route and shoot in a developing nation, where as pointed out the weather would be sunny and clement, but what might not be so helpful was the other conditions and indeed corruption he would meet in his obsession to stage genre movies at these out of the way places. He had his war stories from his two films in his The Dead series prior to this, but Morocco was often used as a location to stand in for anywhere from the Middle East to, well, to Morocco itself, especially by Western filmmakers, therefore presumably it would be a lot better to film in a city which was more used to foreign productions.
As for the plot, it was akin to a certain blockbuster which revitalised Liam Neeson's career, the famed thriller Taken that kicked off a bunch of old guys beating up the bad guys flicks, only in this case it was a mature lady (who we're told has had FBI training, hence her combat skills) rather than a mature gentleman. She wasn't absolutely ancient by any means, but Dixon was noticeably more aged than the sort of actress who might usually be hired for an action role, though this did have the effect of having you wonder if she was actually the baby's grandmother (hey, you can be a grandparent in your forties) rather than her mother, which would add another twist to an already twisty narrative.
Indeed, there comes a time when you may be unsure if there is a baby at all, or if there is whether Lisa was any relation to her (to be honest, she did not appear to be much younger than her screen mother, Lisa Eichhorn), which at least offered an air of enigma if not out and out mystery to the proceedings. Certainly about the same as you would find in the hit television series 24, which came across as the main inspiration for Never Let Go's drama and setpieces, with Dixon our distaff Kiefer Sutherland and just as adept at cracking heads and wielding firearms. All this while she tries to evade the local police who have implicated her in the death of the first man she chased through the streets, mainly because she might as well have murdered him - and he won't be the last death connected to her.
Ford kept up the pace admirably, allowing Lisa barely enough time to get on the phone back to the States and her contact in the FBI who helps her out by tracking the van the baby was in, though she can only tell her so much; she also keeps in contact with the married Clark who is unhappy with this turn of events. But in the main the best elements were when Dixon was on the move, sprinting down the narrow streets, taking precipitous jumps or clambering over the walls like Spider-Woman, for when it tried to explain what was actually happening, you could be forgiven for not picking up on everything too easily. It was not exactly dreamlike, though for parents the scenario would be a nightmare, but it adhered to its own logic that did not necessarily relate entirely accurately to what was going down in the real world. You could overlook a lack of polish (this was a very low budget effort) when it lent the effect a certain grit, and if it was not going to start a new trend, as a one-off it was an achievement of sorts. Music by Imran Ahmad.
