As the title suggests, something’s absent from director Ron Howard’s western suspense thriller, and it isn’t just the abducted girl that Academy Award-winners Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones chase across the American Southwest. What “The Missing” is missing are the little things that separate good films from great ones. The individual performances are solid, but the relationships never quite jell. And it’s puzzling why, at every possible terrifying turn, when he’s got the opportunity to nudge us right off the edges of our seats, Howard instead hands us a safety blanket to thaw the chill. We come tantalizingly close to scary — really scary — but the director is reluctant to take us all the way there. Is it possible his Oscar win last year made him soft? Perhaps he spent too much time visiting the set of long-time producing partner Brian Grazer’s other new release, the abysmal “The Cat In The Hat,” which could have impaired his usually sound judgment. Howard had the key elements of an extraordinary film at his disposal — great premise, cast — yet, frustratingly, “The Missing” never quite realizes its potential.
Blanchett stars as Maggie, a tough-as-nails medicine woman raising two young girls on her own in the rugged 19th-Century frontier. She’s got a doting boyfriend/ranch-hand who goes by the name of Brake (Aaron Eckhart). He wants to make her an honest woman, but Maggie’s clearly got a few issues when it comes to men. Turns out that 20 years earlier her father (Jones, playing a guy named Jones) abandoned her family to go off and live with the Apache Indians. When Jones unexpectedly reappears one day, a bitter Maggie sends him away, claiming he was the cause of her mother’s death. But a kidnapping forces reconciliation, as Maggie and Jones team up to rescue her teenaged daughter Lilly (Evan Rachel Wood of “Thirteen”) from a psychopath (Eric Schweig) intent on selling the girl into slavery in Mexico.
Besides some really good performances, what works in “The Missing” is Howard’s pacing. Like its protagonists, the film never stops for a breather, accentuating the urgency of the rescue mission. The setting — 19th Century New Mexico — is unique for a thriller, and Howard and cinematographer Salvatore Totino take full advantage of the yellow and burnt-orange mesas and craggy hillsides, so that it feels as though we’re watching a Georgia O’Keefe painting in motion. (Rated R for violence. Running time: 130 minutes)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 26, 2003. Read the original PDF.