The Missing

Whatever the merits that the novel 'The Last Ride' by Thomas Eidson, on which Ken Kaufman's script is bsaed, they are well and truly lost in Ron Howard’s film about a mother (Cate Blanchett) and her estranged father (Tommy Lee Jones) in pursuit of a bunch of hostiles who have captured her teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). A kind of politically-correct updating of Ford's classic 1956 Western, The Searchers, it is a lush, over-decorous yet rather tasteless film that renders its story with dire conventionality and at unwarranted length.  

Cate Blanchett must be the most fashionably-dressed struggling frontier-woman not to have had a spread in Vogue (what kind of distressed mother remembers to pack a hair-brush before she goes looking for her abducted daughter?) whilst Aaron Eckhardt could have joined her as Ken to her settler Barbie. Mercifully Eckhardt is disposed of early in proceedings but only to be replaced by Jones sporting cross-over native American threads as a gnarly old survivor (mysteriously he is always clean-shaven) who has little hope for the ways of men, himself included. There’s a Disney-ish touch in the inclusion of the youngest daughter (Jenna Boyd) on the chase and contrivances such as the business about a captured photographer (who remarkably co-incidentally photographs the kidnapped daughter) which comes from nowhere and departs in the same direction whilst the latter part of the film when the plucky pursuers engage with the reprehensible pursued is a familiar action-adventure series of shootouts and goodies-v-baddies shifting fortunes that seem to go on forever as it wends its predictably sentimental course to redemption. To put it bluntly The Missing is a film during which one thinks to oneself more than once: “this is bullshit”.

I don’t know how historically credible is the core behaviour of young white women being kidnapped by renegade Indians and white slime-balls to be sold into prostitution in Mexico but whilst it feels grubby it’s all handled superficially although Salvatore Totino's striking cinematography and an out-of-the-box production design makes everything look very good - just another instance of how wrong The Missing manages to be. 

 

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