Jamie Foxx hunts for his son in the new thriller Sleepless. If he hopes to find him, he might consider taking notes from his movie star peers

In the new movie Sleepless, Jamie Foxx’s son gets kidnapped. If the trailer is any indication, Jamie Foxx then spends the remainder of the film engaged in a series of car chases, fistfights and shootouts that presumably result in the retrieval of his missing son.

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It’s difficult to say, but perhaps Jamie Foxx struck upon this course of action because he’s watched lots of other films where famous people’s children get kidnapped. Hollywood has already laid out a concrete set of rules for dealing with abduction, and I for one have committed them all to memory. If you don’t have time to watch every kidnapping movie, here’s a handy guide.

Be more capable than the kidnapper

So, your child has gone missing. Little does their kidnapper know that they’re messing with the wrong parent. You’re a former intelligence agent with years of hard-fought field experience and contacts spread across the globe. Your job is simple: you will find the people who took your child, and you will kill them. What’s that? You’re not a former intelligence agent, and you wouldn’t even know where to start looking for your missing child? Well, this is awkward.

Don’t ask the police for help

Going to the authorities is absolutely the worst thing you can do. There is a scene in Halle Berry’s new movie, Kidnap, in which, following the disappearance of her child, Berry goes to a police station. She sees all the posters for missing children behind the desk and thinks: “Wait a minute, if the police were any good at their job, then they’d have found all these kids by now.” Realizing that police officers must all be lazy and negligent child-haters, she instead embarks on a madcap vigilante mission to get her son back by herself. And if police aren’t negligent, Sleepless teaches us that all officers are corrupt, working for the person who kidnapped your child, and pretty much exclusively out to kill you.

Track down Morgan Freeman

If your child goes missing for even a second, even if you temporarily misplace them in a supermarket, the first thing you should do is call Morgan Freeman. If you’ve seen Kiss the Girls, you’ll know that he’s a master detective who can track down and kill most kidnappers. Failing that, if you’ve seen Gone Baby Gone, you’ll know that he might actually have kidnapped your offspring himself in order to give them a better life than you ever could. Either way, you’ll get your answer.

If you’ve got the money, pay the ransom

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The 1996 Mel Gibson movie Ransom is over two hours long. If the millionaire character Gibson plays had just handed over the money that the kidnapper wanted in return for his child, it would have been a good 90 minutes shorter and everyone would have got to spend that time doing something more constructive.

Kidnap the kidnapper

Following on from point two, if the police won’t help you, why not do what Hugh Jackman did in Prisoners, by kidnapping and torturing the person who you think kidnapped your children? It doesn’t matter if they didn’t do it, or if they have a mental age of 10, or if they cannot speak coherently about anything, because the torture will make you feel better. Also, it helps if you live in a town full of cartoonish would-be kidnappers, but it isn’t essential.

Just copy everything Liam Neeson did in Taken

That’s essentially what Nicolas Cage did in the film Stolen, and that worked out OK. At least I assume it did. I fell asleep two-thirds of the way through Stolen.

Don’t marry Famke Janssen

In Taken, her child was kidnapped. In Don’t Say a Word, her child was kidnapped. In Taken 2, she was kidnapped. In Taken 3, she was murdered by kidnappers. Honestly, she just seems like more trouble than she’s worth.