Excess Baggage(1997)

SHORT VERSION:
Stick and Gus eventually find and kidnap Emily and Vincent, and they tell Vincent that they want him to go to Emily’s father, Alexander, and get $1 million from him in exchange for her release, having opted to forget about the $200,000 that Dokas gave Vincent for the cars that were accidentally burnt up in his warehouse since the deadline for Vincent to give that money back has passed. After letting him go so he can get the money, Stick and Gus take Emily to another warehouse that Dokas owns and lock her in an upstairs office. Vincent pays Alexander a visit at a boat he owns (Emily was supposed to have met him there at that time to get back the $200,000 that Ray earlier took from Vincent) and fills him in on the situation, but Alexander doesn’t buy that Emily has been kidnapped for real and refuses to provide the ransom money, having already spent that much for her earlier this week during her staged kidnapping. He has Ray give Vincent his $200,000 back, but shortly after Ray forces Vincent to leave, he decides to follow him just in case Emily really is in trouble.

Ray approaches Vincent and Stick at a pool hall while they are arguing over whether Vincent will fork over his bag of money first or Stick will bring Emily to him first, and after Ray threatens Stick with a handgun that he has in his possession, he forces Stick to take him and Vincent to where Emily is being held. Stick and Gus wind up getting the better of Vincent and Ray after they arrive at the warehouse, and after Stick checks the bag and sees that it contains just $200,000, he comes to believe that Vincent stole $800,000 and he and Gus start to threaten him with their guns. Fortunately, Emily – having gotten free of her confines at this point – drives a forklift through a nearby wall, and this distraction enables Vincent and Ray to overpower and subdue the criminals. Ray then makes it seem like he wants to take out Vincent, but Emily deduces that he isn’t going to, and he is doing this solely for her. Emily then calls her house and gets her father’s assistant, Jon, on the line, and as she asks him where her father is, the cops listening in on the call figure out where she is and send some men over to the warehouse. They arrive just as Emily and Ray are walking out of the warehouse, and Ray places the blame for both the real kidnapping and the staged one on Stick and Gus, who are tied up inside. However, Vincent is nowhere to be seen.

When Emily returns home, she tells her father that she intends to tell the press about how she started this whole kidnapping episode, feeling that, because it is her mess, it is her responsibility to sort things out. She also tells her father that she won’t be here when he returns from his important business meeting in Belgium because she is moving out, having given up on getting his attention and affection. Later on, she gets in the car that Ray brought her home in and drives to a parking garage, and she opens the trunk to reveal that Vincent is inside, having been hiding in there the whole time. They share a bottle of red wine that she got for him as a present before they start to make out in the trunk.

LONG VERSION:
Sometime after Vincent (Benicio del Toro) finds Emily (Alicia Silverstone) in the trunk of her own car in his warehouse (where she was trying to stage her own kidnapping so she could finally get the attention and affection of her father, Alexander [Jack Thompson]), he heads to a payphone at a nearby diner and calls his friend and fellow car thief, Greg (Harry Connick Jr.), and tells him to come down to the warehouse. Vincent then goes back there, and after he has a physical confrontation with Emily (who got out of the trunk in the interim), he handcuffs her to a pipe in the bathroom. Greg then shows up with $200,000 in a bag from Dokas, who is fixing to buy three stolen cars being kept in the warehouse with that money, and Vincent shows him the problem that he now has on his hands. Greg ultimately suggests to him that he take her out of the city and drop her off somewhere, after which he leaves the money with Vincent and takes off. Vincent forces Emily to wear a blindfold so she can’t see where the warehouse is and gets her to sit in the front seat of his own car, but when she decides to light up a cigarette before the start of the trip, Vincent orders her to put it out. She throws it out the window, but she unknowingly sends it into a basket full of oily rags, and moments after she and Vincent depart the warehouse, a fire starts that winds up destroying the whole place and all of the cars in it. Sometime later, Stick (Nicholas Turturro) and Gus (Michael Bowen) – two criminals working for Dokas – show up at the warehouse in a semi-truck to collect the cars for Dokas, but after seeing all of the cops and firemen there dealing with the fire, they promptly drive away. They then track down Greg to a posh restaurant, where he is dining there with a date, and Stick goes inside to confront him. After asking Greg’s date to give them some alone time for a bit, Stick asks and gets confirmation from Greg that he saw Vincent and gave him the money from Dokas, but then he enlightens him to the destruction of the warehouse and the cars that Dokas wanted. After Greg randomly mentions that Vincent said something about going to Brazil, Stick comes to the conclusion that Vincent is fleeing to Brazil with the money. Greg’s date then returns, and Stick takes his leave, but not before he hints to Greg that there will be a response to this.

After Vincent drops Emily off on a section of the highway two miles from a motel, he goes to a gas station to buy some gas and snacks. While he is there, he sees a news report on the TV inside the station showing the warehouse fire and how Emily’s car was found in it, and the newscaster claims that her kidnappers were using the place as a hideout and that Emily is now missing. He quickly realizes that the police are going to wrongfully blame him for Emily’s “kidnapping”, so he drives back down the highway and finds her. After explaining the trouble that he could likely be facing, he offers to take her to the gas station he was just at and let her call her family on the station’s payphone to let them know that she is fine. She ultimately agrees to come with him, but when he calls her house and gets in touch with Alexander, she tells him that the kidnapper made her touch his penis, forcing Vincent to end the call. Vincent is ready to abandon her at this point, but she jumps into his car and handcuffs herself to the dashboard. She then shows him that she has the key to the cuffs in her mouth, but she accidentally swallows it when Vincent tries to force her to give it to him. As they continue driving down the highway, Emily tells him that only she can get him out of the mess that he is in. She then receives a call on her cell phone from her “uncle” Ray (Christopher Walken), who tells her that she needs to stop crying wolf all the time before asking if he can have a word with Vincent, having learned from a worker at a diner near Vincent’s warehouse what his name was and that he lived in that warehouse. Emily just tells him to stay out of this and hangs up on him, and after she does, she tells Vincent to drop her off at the next motel. Once they get there, Vincent checks her into a room, and she removes her cuffs using a spare key that she had been keeping in her boot and goes inside. Vincent then drives off towards a cabin that he owns.

Upon reaching the cabin in the morning, he telephones Greg and tells him where he is, then tells him that their warehouse got torched. Greg replies that he already knows this, and he also knows that two guys are very unhappy about the whole situation. Vincent tells Greg that he needs to warn Dokas that it was a case of arson, but Greg informs him that Dokas just wants his money back. After Vincent confirms that he still has it, Greg tells him to bring it over to him at the auto dealership he works at, but Vincent informs him that he is too tired to drive right now and needs to get some sleep. Greg thus agrees to meet up with him in the bar of the Knotty Pines Hotel at 3:00 today and asks him not to let him down because this could get ugly for both of them.

Later that morning, Vincent is woken from his sleep by Ray, who got the location of the town that the cabin was in from the same diner worker and then found out the cabin’s location from a worker in a local store. Vincent initially thinks that Ray works for Dokas, but Ray soon introduces himself as Emily’s “uncle” and tells Vincent that he needs to find Emily and that he must take him to her. After Vincent tells him where she is, he informs him that they are going there together, and he takes the $200,000 as “insurance” so he will cooperate. They find Emily sitting at one of the tables in the motel’s restaurant eating breakfast and fantasizing that her father cares about her, and after Emily tells Ray that she is not going back to her father’s house with him, Vincent gets Emily to confess to Ray that he did not sexually assault her. After Emily and Ray force Vincent to go sit at the bar so they can talk privately, Ray warns Emily that she will face several felony charges that will lead to prison time if the cops find out that she orchestrated this false kidnapping scheme, and he plans on turning Vincent over to the police and get him charged with her kidnapping so he can spare her from incarceration. Emily tells him that he is not going to do that to Vincent, and Ray replies that he is just trying to keep her out of jail. He then orders her to come home with him, but Emily instead creates a scene in the restaurant designed to make Ray look bad, which gives her a chance to grab Vincent and force him to leave with her. After they get outside, she explains what Ray intended to do with him, but Vincent basically tells her that he wants nothing further to do with her, then sits on the back of Ray’s car to wait for him to return so he can get his money out of it and then leave, despite Emily warning him that Ray will kill him. As Ray approaches the duo, he pulls out his revolver, so Emily and Vincent run off into the woods behind the motel to escape him. They end up at another road and hitch a ride on a passing truck, and Emily informs Vincent that she is the only person who can get his money back for him.

After ending up at a shipyard, Emily and Vincent steal a truck there, and Vincent has Emily drive him to the Knotty Pines Hotel so he can meet Greg. After they find Greg at the bar, Vincent informs him that he doesn’t have the $200,000 anymore because he left it in Emily’s uncle’s car, and Greg tells Vincent that Stick and Gus think that they deliberately burned down the warehouse and made off with the cash. After Vincent and Emily tell Greg that Emily’s father is going to get them the money, Emily leaves the table to get her and Vincent a room, plus she places a call to Alexander, who is currently on his boat (she knew he’d be there because he can’t do any of his corrupt business practices in the house with the police listening in on every call). She tells him that Ray ripped off her friend, so she wants his money back and wants her friend left unharmed, and if he does that for her, then she will come home and he can get back to his business. Alexander agrees to this arrangement and tells her to meet him at his boat tomorrow. After he ends the call, Ray tells him that, when she does come back, there is going to be a certain amount of trouble to deal with. Alexander replies that he will look after the police, and he must take care of the rest.

Emily and Vincent spend their night in their hotel room getting to know each other better, and Vincent asks Emily why she put herself in the trunk of that car. She replies that she was trying to make her father feel something because she feels that he has treated her like a commodity her whole life. Vincent then asks if she was doing this to get even with him, and she replies that she doesn’t know; she always thought that there was no one and nothing in the whole world that could make her feel like she knew who she was, except for her father. Vincent tells her that she must find herself, and if she shows herself who she is, she won’t need her father telling her who she is. He lastly says that the best way to make a dream come true is to wake up, and then she will find whatever she wants. Later on, Emily asks Vincent what HE wants, and he replies that he would like to open his own chain of karaoke bars in Brazil. Confused, Emily brings up that he wants to make money (from stealing cars) and then go on the run just to make more money, and she criticizes that as stupid because she has had that her whole life and it doesn’t do any good. He responds by telling her that he doesn’t want to open those karaoke bars just for the money, and he knows that stealing cars is wrong. Emily then asks him what will become of them once he gets his money, and he invites her to come down to Brazil with him. Soon after, they share their first kiss.

The next morning, when Emily and Vincent return to their hotel room after having breakfast, they are ambushed and kidnapped by Stick and Gus. They then take them to a car driven by Greg, whom they earlier beat up before forcing him to bring them here, and they stuff Emily in the trunk and put Vincent in the back seat. As they all drive away, Stick and Gus tell Vincent that they found out that Emily’s father is filthy rich, and because of that, they now want $1 million in cash instead of the $200,000, having given up on the latter sum since Vincent’s deadline to give it back has passed. They eventually drop Vincent and Greg off outside the pier where Alexander’s boat is docked and leave with Emily, in parting repeating their ransom demand. Greg is ready to flee the country at this point, but Vincent tells him that, before he does that, he must call Dokas and tell him that Stick and Gus took his money and burned down the warehouse. As for himself, he will take care of this problem with Emily.

Stick and Gus drive into another warehouse owned by Dokas, and while Gus fights with and overpowers Emily, Stick places a call to Dokas. He gets one of his employees instead, so he tells the person to tell Dokas that he and Gus have the situation under control and that he is going to get all of his money back “with interest”, and they will call him (the employee) back when they make the final arrangements. After he gets off the phone, he orders Gus to lock Emily in the upstairs office. Meanwhile, Vincent heads down to the boat and approaches Alexander and Ray, and he tells them that Emily is not here to meet them because she has been kidnapped for real and her kidnappers want $1 million for her, and he warns that the kidnappers are stupid and dangerous. Alexander thinks that Emily is just trying to stop him from getting his flight to Belgium today so he can close one of his shady business deals, and he tells Vincent that has no intention of paying the ransom because he already paid that much for her this week (during her false kidnapping). Vincent replies that this isn’t about anyone’s money, but about his daughter, and he asks him if she isn’t worth that much money to him. Alexander decides to give him back the $200,000 that Ray took from him, but not a cent more, and Vincent tells him that he can turn his back on him all he wants, but he can’t turn his back on his own daughter, especially not now. Alexander is unmoved, and Ray returns the $200,000 to Vincent and forces him to leave. Alexander tells Ray that he has a plane to catch, but Ray asks him if they ought to make sure that Emily is okay first. Alexander just orders him to make sure of that himself.

Vincent meets up with Stick at a pool hall carrying the bag containing the $200,000, but they soon get into a private confrontation in another part of the hall over whether Vincent will hand over the cash first or Stick will bring Emily to him first. Suddenly, Ray appears behind Stick, and he introduces himself as Vincent’s friend before telling him that he has a silenced handgun pointed right up his butt, after which he and Vincent force Stick to come with them. As they drive to the warehouse, Vincent criticizes Ray for working for someone like Alexander and for not looking out for Emily himself since her own father clearly won’t do it, but Ray replies that it was always his job to look after Emily so he could make sure that she could take care of herself. Meanwhile, Emily escapes the office by climbing out of it through a few rotted ceiling tiles, and she proceeds to walk across the ceiling’s beams before climbing down to the floor. Soon after, Vincent, Ray, and Stick make their arrival, and after they step out of the car, Stick calls for Gus, who emerges from a hiding place, holds Ray up, and relieves him of his weapon. Stick then forces Vincent to hand over the bag, but after checking and seeing that the bag only has $200,000 in it, Stick and Gus angrily accuse Vincent of taking $800,000 from them. Fortunately, before they can do him or Ray any harm, Emily comes crashing through one of the walls driving a forklift with a car on the forks, and this distraction enables Ray to take out another gun he had been hiding in the small of his back and shoot Gus in his right arm. It also gives Vincent a chance to floor Stick with a punch to the face and then take his handgun. Moments later, Ray points his gun at Vincent and asks him what he should do with him, and when Emily questions this, Ray replies that her father’s instructions were explicit and he will not let her embarrass him. However, Emily figures out that Ray really has no intention of killing Vincent, and he is doing this gesture solely for her. Emily then calls her father’s house and gets his assistant, Jon (Hiro Kanagawa), on the line, and as she asks him where her father is, the cops listening in on the call figure out where she is located. Soon after, a bunch of police officers come down to the warehouse, and after Emily and Ray walk out together and greet them, Ray places the blame for both the real kidnapping and the staged one on Stick and Gus when he tells the police that the kidnappers are tied up inside. He then puts Emily in the car that he and Vincent came in and takes her home, but there is no sign of Vincent anywhere.

On the way back to her house, Ray remarks that he was going to stick around town, but he doesn’t think that he has to now. Emily tells him that she can always use him in her life, and Ray reminds her that, if she ever needs him, he is just a phone call away. Emily meets with her father inside, and he tells her that they have to think of damage control and that his lawyers will be there when she makes her statement to the press about the kidnapping. She replies that that won’t be necessary because she intends to tell the press how she started this whole thing, citing that it is her mess and thus her responsibility to sort things out. Alexander tells her that it is good to have her home, but she lets him know that she won’t be here when he gets back from Belgium because she is moving out. Alexander responds to this by telling her that, as distasteful as this may be to her, she is still his daughter, and he is still her father. After she replies that she knows this, she leaves his sight.

That night, Emily puts her stuff in the car that Ray drove her home in and drives away. Sometime later, she parks the car in a parking garage, and she opens the trunk to reveal that Vincent is in it, having been hiding in there the whole time. They then share a bottle of red wine that she got for him as a present before they start to make out in the trunk.