In the parking lot, she sees a woman physically dragging her son into a green Ford Mustang driven by a man.

The two kidnappers evade Karla by tossing a spare tire into a busy highway and causing a chain reaction crash pile-up and then threatening to kill Frankie with a knife.

Terry emerges from the car with a shotgun, but Karla manages to kill him by pinching his arm against the door frame of her minivan, and disabling the van's parking brake, causing the van to go downhill, offroad, while still holding on to Terry's arm, after a few seconds, the minivan crashes into a tree, killing him.

[2][3] Relativity Media acquired the distribution rights in September,[4] and Sage Correa, Chris McGinn, and Lew Temple were added to the cast in October.

[5][8][9] Prieto said the action sequences were inspired by films from the 1980s that encouraged him to implement practical effects, so the actors' reactions could be genuine, instead of CGI.

[13] However, in July 2015, the distributor was $320 million in debt and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which resulted in the release date for Kidnap being moved to February 26, 2016.

[23] On July 31, 2017, Kidnap premiered at the ArcLight Hollywood multiplex, before being theatrically released in the United States and Canada on August 4, 2017.

[32] The film was released alongside The Dark Tower and the wide expansion of Detroit, and was projected to gross $8 million from 2,378 theaters in its opening weekend.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Kidnap strays into poorly scripted exploitation too often to take advantage of its pulpy premise – or the still-impressive talents of its committed star.

[43] David Ehrlich from IndieWire gave it a "D−" along with a similar response where he also criticized the directing, writing that Prieto "never demonstrates the interest to allow his heroine to take things into her own hands, but the movie does gain momentum as it chugs along.

"[44] Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips gave Kidnap two stars out of five, and said that the film did not do everything possible to take advantage of its "own monstrously exploitative premise" and instead focused on making it realistic.

[45] The Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper also gave the same rating and criticized the runtime, screenplay, characters, cinematography, and repetitive closeups, while also giving praise to Halle Berry's performance.

[47] In his three stars out of four review, Rex Reed from The New York Observer found the feature to be "another entry in the overcrowded, snatched-in-broad-daylight genre of abducted-children thrillers", but said that it had "no shortage of thrills".

"[49] From The New York Times, Teo Bugbee gave Kidnap a positive review, writing that it "doesn't waste time trying to build an arc to Karla's desperation" and found that Berry "approaches the task of playing this unhinged mother on the run with sincerity [...] her adrenaline kicks in the moment she sees Frankie being shoved into the back seat of an unfamiliar Mustang, and it doesn't dip until the credits roll.

[52] In July 2018, Brice Fisher was nominated at the 39th Young Artist Awards for Best Performance in a Feature Film – Supporting Teen Actor.