The Missing

(2003) **1/2

I pulled a Burt. That's what we called it in our house growing up when you rented a movie you'd forgotten you already had seen. Our dad/step-dad did that ALL the time, and the video store was literally in another state. He'd come home with a stack of those old generic plastic huge VHS cases, and realize 5 minutes into half of the movies that he rented this one before.

So I remember seeing a preview for this Western thriller at some point in 2002 (I guess), thinking that it looked really good and spooky. But then I missed seeing it for years, so it's always been one I've been meaning to go back and check out, which I finally did last night. Well, about a half hour in, I realized that I'd seen it before. I think I must have stumbled across it on late night cable sometime, and just caught it from midway or something.

Oh well, it's a Ron Howard movie, which should tell you that it's aggressively competent. The plot is essentially a ripoff of the Searchers: a group of Indians kidnap a white girl, and Tommy Lee Jones heads off to rescue her.

The good: The Indian villain is a very un-PC nasty savage son of a bitch, which lends the film a thriller feel that is genuinely creepy at times. He's not only kidnapping white girls to sell into Mexico, but he's some sort of voodoo witch doctor who rips out hearts and mixes the blood with snake poison and shit. The cinematography also sets up kind of a ghost story/horror vibe, especially true in the beginning when Howard is setting up the kidnapping.

The bad: By the time the chase begins, however, it becomes a fairly drawn out and tame exercise in Western predictablity. Jones and Blanchett are both good in their roles, but you can almost feel Jones holding back from going "full retard" like Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall. His character as written certainly has all the stuff of a clownish mystic old grandpa (he'd gone native years before, so he wears Indian garb and throws sand in the air when he prays and shit like that). And of course you can't help but roll your eyes when grandpa and his plucky frontier daughter take on a whole group of better armed Apaches. Yeah right.

Anyway, so it's sorta two movies: one good half blending Western and thriller motifs; one mediocre half offering up an homage to a (way better) Western classic.