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The Missing
(Reviewed November 19, 2003)
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Slim-and-blond frontier teen beauty Evan Rachel Wood is abducted by a buncha nasty, murderin', no-account Injuns who are making a run to Mexico to sell her into white slavery. Fortunately, though, the
fiends apparently are members of the "No-Rape-Um" tribe, because Evan and her seven fellow bound-and-helpless female captives are left unbelievably unmolested during the several-days-long trip.
That's the main thing wrong with "The Missing": The plot's unrealistic modesty seems dishonest. What makes this timidity incomprehensible is that the movie has an "R" rating. That should have meant a considerably grittier accounting of the actual unpleasantness that would befall a bunch of womenfolk being herded toward whoremongers by outlaws.
The main thing right about the movie is that it offers some genuinely interesting takes on standard Western stereotypes. Tommy Lee Jones is a deadbeat dad who went native -- Native American, that is -- by abandoning his family and living as an Apache years before the movie opens. Daughter Cate Blanchett doesn't
want anything to do with him when he tries to come back into her life and make amends. She is a "healer" who is single-momming it with two daughters, one of them being the aforementioned Evan. There's also a shiftless Army captain (Val Kilmer) whose men are only interested in looting, and the movie's main bad guy is a real bastard of a bruja (a curse-wielding wizard-type whose idea of fun is milking rattlesnakes and hanging them from trees). All of these are characters who should have been in a better story. Oh, well.
So, what we have here is yet another movie that's not so much "bad" as "not as good as it should have been."
Could be worse.
(One weird thing: There's a dialog scene in this movie that is almost identical to one in "The Last Samurai," when characters say something about having both good and evil inside them. When
asked which one wins, the reply is "the one I feed the most." Different writers wrote the two movies, making it a very odd coincidence that both feature the same hokey exchange.)
Back Row Grade: C+
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