The Missing


2/4

Starring: Cate Blanchett, Tommy Lee Jones, Jenna Boyd, Eric Schweig, Evan Rachel Wood, Aaron Eckhart, Val Kilmer

Rated R for Violence

With a pedigree like this (a top-notch cast and Oscar winning director Ron Howard), it’s entirely reasonable to expect something that is entirely worth watching.  Sadly, though, Ron Howard’s revisionist Western is dull and repetitive, with violence and gore replacing legitimate characters and plot.

Maggie Gilkeson (Blanchett) is a good Christian woman who is raising two daughters, Lilly (Wood) and Dot (Boyd) with her boyfriend (Eckhart).  One day, her estranged father, Samuel (Jones) visits, much to Maggie’s irritation.  Samuel left her mother when she was young to join an Indian tribe.  Soon after, Lilly is kidnapped by an Apache witch doctor (Schweig) with the intention of being sold into slavery.  Maggie and Dot must trust Samuel to help them track the kidnappers and find Lilly.

It’s not necessarily an original premise, but it opens the door for the story and its characters to go into different directions.  Unfortunately, that’s not what happens.  Either because the source material was bad to begin with, the script (by Ken Kaufman) was badly adapted, or because Howard elected to play it safe, the film doesn’t really go anywhere.  Sure, things happen, but Howard doesn’t generate much interest.  He spins his wheels for two hours, and it’s not halfway before the film starts to go in a very unwelcome direction: boredom.

It’s hard to fault the actors, because they do the best they can.  Cate Blanchett, who can do no wrong (except for “Notes on a Scandal,” in which she was flat, although that may have been the idea), manages well with both a Southern accent and a gun (seeing this dramatic actress doing some gunfighting is actually kind of cool…I wish the film would have had more moments like this).  Tommy Lee Jones is also effective in a role that is well within his limited range.  It’s a traditional character, but Jones plays him with life and energy.  Less impressive are the supporting characters.  Boyd is annoying as Dot; I wish it was her that got kidnapped instead of the much more talented Wood (who is in far too few roles these days).  Also lacking is Eric Schweig.  Although he wears a constant sneer and has a rugged appearance (just like everyone else in this movie), he fails to truly chill.

Ron Howard is a good director.  “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind” were amazing films, and “Ransom” isn’t far behind.  But here, he has made a rare flop, and it’s kind of obvious why it doesn’t work.  One, the Indian mysticism elements, which are very important, go unexplained.  As I have said before time and time again, when a movie introduces elements that don’t exist in the world as we know it, it needs to establish a set of rules about what can and cannot happen and then follow them.  “The Missing” doesn’t do that.  More importantly, Howard’s heart clearly isn’t in this.  He seems to be in the “take the money and run” mode, and that’s evident in every frame (even the dazzling cinematography by Salvatore Totino can’t camouflage this fact.

The western used to be a genre staple in the early days of cinema.  “The Missing” didn’t manage to give the genre a comeback, and the reasons why are obvious.

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