Customer Reviews

The Missing (Special Edition, Widescreen)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

New Mexico has one of the most beautiful and haunting landscapes in the United States. Desert, arroyo, plains, twisted wood and rock formations, and a sky that is like something out of a dream. In The Missing, this landscape shifts constantly, evoking fantastic and surreal images that lend well to the mood of the story.

Cate Blanchett stars as Maggie, a tough and independent frontier "healer," who is also a single mother of two girls. Her independence is not enough to save her from the nightmare that erupts when a renegade Apache brujo (sorceror/male witch) kidnaps her teenage daughter Lily. The Brujo is selling young women as sex slaves in Mexico. This man is one bad Indian. Like Lonesome Dove's Blue Duck, the Brujo lends this gritty Western authenticity in these days of forced diversity and political correctness. Not to give anything of the story away, let's just say the villian's methods of killing are creative. This makes The Missing a very violent and disturbing movie.

Tommy Lee Jones stars as Maggie's estranged father. He is steeped in Indian ways himself, having lived with the Chirakawa tribe when he abandoned his family when Maggie was a little girl. Consequently, Maggie has intense hatred for her father. One of the very touching elements in the story is young Dot's eagerness to get to know her grandfather over her mother's rage. Revenge is not served up here, rather repentance is. Going after what you love, what has been taken from you, has consequences. Maggie's outright revulsion for Indians also has a terrible and unforseen consequence in the movie. Indian magic and witchcraft is real in this film, blending with the shape-shifting landscape. For further understanding of Native American witchcraft, Tony Hillerman's novel Skinwalkers is good.

The movie's general sequence of events is predictable, but that was not enough to stop me from weeping at the end. Also, the suspense was incredible. I should have known with a Ron Howard movie. I plan on purchasing this DVD, and I think my husband will really enjoy it, too.

Ron Howard's THE MISSING is a blend of western, action and supernatural ingredients. Having the marvelous Cate Blanchett as Maggie catapults the picture into its worthiness. Blanchett is exceptional as Maggie, a single frontier mother raising two feisty daughters (played wonderfully by Evan Rachel Wood and Jenna Boyd), while maintaining an affair with the affable Brake (Aaron Eckhart, always good). Her estranged father shows up one day and it's obvious Maggie has little affection for him. Tommy Lee Jones plays the father, with his usual swagger and rugged machismo. His performance is good, but he is overshadowed by Ms. Blanchett.
The movie has a cruelty to it, in that Eric Schweig as El Brujo is a heartless and cruel man, perhaps even a witch?? His treatment of the girls he kidnaps is brutal and inhumane, so this adds a very dark edge to the film.
The photography is sumptious, and the music appropriately moving. The film tends to bog down at times, and it's length at over two hours doesn't help. Overall, though, THE MISSING shows the talent of a very determined director and a wonderful gifted actress. That makes it worth viewing.

This film tells us about the undercover, underhanded dealing of our government - facts that are increasingly known but were not when this film was made. Excellent acting, photography, story-telling. One of my favorite films.

"The Missing" is an incredible piece work, an epic western, and an effectively eerie thriller. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, this film is worth a peek and watchable, despite being bogged down by repetitive flaws and an unnecessary length. Then again, 2003 wasn't the best movie year...

The film involves a healer Maggie (Cate Blanchett) who lives on a farm with her lover Brake and her two children. Her father (Tommy Lee Jones) has been estranged from her since she was a child and he has since become an Indian and married many times. One evening, Maggie's father comes to their ranch in search of a healer, not realizing that she is his own daughter. She completely ignores him and quickly fixes him up. He is arrested that evening after a scuffle with Brake, who is also preparing to take the two daughters to a fair the next day. When the daughters and Brake go off to the festival, Maggie falls asleep on her porch and awakes to find a wolf in her house and a creepy feeling about the air. She is unsure of her family's whereabouts and ventures into the woods to find them. There is a butchered Brake and the younger daughter, Dot, screaming because her older sister is gone, having been kidnapped by a brutal group of Apache Indians. Maggie has her father released from jail and he assists her in finding the daughter. Dot insists on joining them and they venture off into plains, floods, and grounds of witchcraft to track the Indians.

Some may call this a horror film, and in fact, I remember one critic calling it "Stephen King's 'Little House on the Prairie.'" It is not a scary film, though. The idea of kidnapping and Indians might be disturbing to some, but it is not at all scary. The trailers misrepresent the film. It is, in fact, a riveting drama with fine performances and a brain. The musical score is captivating and beautiful, certainly deserving of an Oscar nomination. The photography is gritty and evocative, capturing the essence of the pain that Maggie and her family must be going through. The screenplay is weak, though, in several spots. The dialogue is often smart but often unclear. It probably takes several viewings to truly understand this movie.

The performances are really what make this film good. Cate Blanchett is brilliant, as usual, and never fails for a moment. You can't take your eyes off the screen because she is just so great. Tommy Lee Jones also reemerges with a fine performance too, worthy of an Oscar nomination. These two stars are great together, and the young actresses are good as well. Aaron Eckhart is solid, but not great, seeing as he is only in the first 30 minutes of the movie. The acting makes the movie.

Overall, the film is worth a viewing, even though flaws are seen throughout. I really found it enjoyable and thrilling, but it kept ending and ending. Why do movies do this? They never want to end...do they?

The Missing isn't my favorite movie but it does have a lot going for it. Northern New Mexico 1885 is the setting in which a youngish single mother and her two daughters try to make a living on her ranch (supplemented by her doctoring/dental skills) with the help of a couple of hired hands (one of which is her lover).
As shown their life is cold and dreary, the oldest daughter can think of nothing but getting away somehow, someday. Maggie's father "Jones", played by Tommy Lee Jones, who abandoned his family many years before comes to visit- and is given orders to leave the next morning because she doesn't want him around.
Soon after that the girls go off with the men on ranch work, Maggie learns that something is wrong when a riderless horse makes it back to the ranch. She tears off on a search and finds both men dead, her eldest daughter kidnapped by slavers bound for Mexico.
Maggie and Dot(the youngest daughter) head for town to get help but end up with only her father's aid (he'd been jailed by the sheriff- Clint Howard, who doesn't seem to get good acting jobs unless Director/ brother Ron gives them to him). Using Jones tracking skills the trio finds the trail and learn of other vicitms. Val Kilmer makes a brief cameo as an Army Lieutenant on a separate search- in the wrong direction of course (I didn't realize who he was until I saw the credits).
Eventually Jones and the ladies meet up with a couple of his Indian friends and they find all of the missing women. Jones is killed in the process of saving Maggie from the brujo (who is also killed).
I though the movie was often slow but very detailed at all sorts of levels from scenery to clothing and weapons. The extras disc has a lot of mini features, most of which don't mean very much except to show something of the process in which the film was shot. One of the most interesting was the one in which we learn about how the cast was taught to speak the correct Apache dialect- one of their advisers was the greatgranddaughter of the Chiricauhua Chief Cochise.
Cate Blanchett did very well with an American accent although her native Australian didn't seem to me to be as strong as some I've heard. Tommy Lee Jones was good, but then he could practically sleep walk his way through and get the job done, he's a natural. Jenna Boyd, Dot, did well too.

At the end of the 19th century Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett), a rural doctor in the state of New Mexico, has to face the return of her unwanted father Samuel Jones (Tommy Lee Jones). Samuel who ran off with a Native American woman now has to face the music as he is rejected by his own daughter that he abandoned years ago. Maggie is forced to seek Samuel's help as one of her daughters is kidnapped by an evil medicine man to be sold in Mexico. Reunited the family struggles to find a way to get Maggie's daughter back. The Missing has beautiful cinematography and a strong performance by the cast. However, the story fails to connect with the audience as the disturbing elements of the story seem cleansed from indecent material. This leaves the audience with an awkward cinematic experience as the true rudimentary element of the story has been removed.

"The Missing" definetely had the potential to be one of Ron Howard's best films, but somewhere along the way Howard seemed to have given up on it. It begins as a family melodrama and brutal western thrown into one, and the beginning scenes are fairly tense and effective. The cinematography in the films is sometimes downright stunning, stuitably bleak and gritty. However, Howard chose at one point to abandon the risks he was taking in making such a dark and uncompromising film, as it eventually feels watered down.

WARNING: MODERATE SPOILERS AHEAD

If you recall, Ron Howard films are usually tense and entertaining, but have upbeat conclusions and are never too graphic. Despite what the beginning of the film leads you to believe, this description applies to "The Missing" as well. Exempting brutal attacks at the beginning of the film (which happen off-screen- we only see the results) and a pointless-but-gory bit involving a photographer's death, "The Missing" really just feels like a normal Ron Howard film with a slight dark edge. Howard's various choices- like making sure Maggie's kidnapped daughter is never in any real danger of being raped, despite what she's kidnapped for- eventually just give the impression that he's going through the motions and not taking any real risks.

For me, "The Missing" really falls apart when the villain Brujo (or whatever he's called) appears. This guy was so laughably evil and one-dimensional that he would have been at home in a Saturday morning cartoon. We're never offered any motivations for his actions, so the film quickly becomes a simple good vs. evil tale- it feels insulting to your intelligence, since the film was obviously aimed at adults. Why does the Brujo brutally kill people and kidnap women to sell into slavery? Because it makes him feel good! I'm not kidding, the guy only smiles when he's watching the suffering of others. Not exactly a complex (and hence real) character.

This whole review probably feels kind of rambling, and that's because I had very mixed feelings about "The Missing". It's a solid adventure story with some impressive acting (especially from Cate Blanchett), but I just felt it could have been so much more. By refusing to take too many risks, Howard eventually just leaves you with an entertaining- but ultimately forgettable- action/western movie.

I wanted to see "The Missing" when it came out in the movie theater but for one reason or another it passed me by. Rented the DVD, and quite frankly loved it. Tommy Lee Jones does a great job as the cantankerous grandfather, and Cate Blanchett was excellent as the hardened rancher.

The plot: When a rancher's daughter is kidnapped she appeals to her estranged tracker grandfather for assistance. Together they track the kidnappers across the frontier and face mutual hardship. Can they save her Lilly or is she doomed for slavery in Mexico?

I really liked the film. The cinematography was beautiful and I liked the scenes with the Native American actors. I did think some scenes were unnecessarily gruesome (the murdered ranch hands), (the tooth removal scene), but that's what the fast forward button is for. Oh, and I also thought Lilly was a complete waste of space. I think this movie would've had more impact if the person kidnapped was someone I actually liked.

Excellent film. Because of violence and some gruesome scenes, I recommend for 18+ or older.

my father in law sent this movie and now I find myself in a "The Ring" type dilemma. Should I destroy this copy and never speak of it again or keep it and warn people away from it, knowing how horrible it is, at the risk someone might unwittingly find it and watch it and waste several hours of life watching a movie even more depressing than Leaving Los Vegas.

Terrible, terrible movie. Do not waste your time.

What is it with Hollywood? Are there some ancient rituals or rules to plots that MUST be followed? Like: man sleep with woman, next day he dead (see Cold Mountain, etc.) Strong woman show little or no interest in men and especially hate father. All men, except weinies, must die in movie (see Cold Mountain, etc.) So here we go again, just about all the men die or are portrayed as useless. One of which is Val Kilmer-just what the heck is he doing in this movie? Did he sneak in in disguise? And Cate's family-all women-except dear old dad who ran off one day chasing a hawk, and a brother who died young (of course!). The only decent man in the movie sleeps with Cate once, ignorant of the fact that this means he must DIE the next day (and horribly too). The story revolves around this anti-testosterone theme: REALLY bad men have kidnapped women to do REALLY bad things to them so the women have to get some less bad men to stop that. Both the really bad men and the less bad men kill each other off leaving a matriarchal society to straighten out the Wild West. In a slight plot twist, one of the men, who is really a boy and looks like a girl, is allowed to survive with the women as long a he behaves himself. Tommy Lee Jones, who is obviously going to remain a manly man no matter what, must die. However, since his daughter begins to tolerate him, in his death, his body is only slightly mutilated by falling not as far as the really bad guy who falls a lot farther and gets all messed up. As all the women are freed both in mind and body (being widows for the most part now)they ride off leaving the men for the buzzards.