Good Direction, Not Great Film
I've heard a lot of people say "if you've seen one western, you've seen 'em all." After seeing a bunch of John Wayne movies, I was inclined to agree. After seeing "The Missing"....I'm still inclined to agree.
This is a movie that features great actors giving good performances for a pretty bad story. To be brief about it, Tommy Lee Jones plays the father of Cate Blanchett's character, who shows up at her doorstep years after abandoning the family to live among the Indians. Blanchett has become a well established doctor in 1885 New Mexico, and wants nothing to do with him, or her two daughters, or her sex toy.
Blanchett's oldest daughter Lilly, (Evan Rachel Wood) is quite horomonal, and eventually she and her younger sister Dot are accompanied into town by Cate's boyfriend for a "future" show. Along the way, they get attacked by Indians, leaving two people dead, Miss Wood kidnapped, and Dot left screaming in the woods for mommy.
In short, Cate enlists Tommy Lee Jones to help track the Indians down and stop them from selling her daughter (along with several other girls) into prostitution in Mexico. Dot, of course, is brought along for the ride since "she would've just followed us anyway"
This leads to a couple of pretty intense battle scenes, and a lot of slow moving scenes with little but dialogue designed to try to make us feel for the family.
But yet we can't feel for the family, as we know nothing is going to happen to the daughter! There is one scene where she gets loose from her rope, frees another woman, attempts to ride away on a horse, gets caught, and gets kicked and whipped a few times as punishment.
Totally not believable, especially with the other stuff going on in that scene, which I won't get into details about.
The film is a long journey of close calls, near misses, and poorly written dialogue that leaves you wondering why you should care for these characters.
Still, the actors did very very well with what they were given, and Ron Howard, as usual, directed the heck out of this film. There are a lot of very gorgeous shots in this one.
It gets a solid B out of me.Read full review
