It is difficult to make a movie about childhood abductions. You can't risk traumatising the child actors. You dare not make it so realistic that you are accused of producing porn for sexual predators that encourages them to crime. What actor wants a role more stigmatising than Norman Bates? apparently Tom Arnold.
This movie tackles the problem by showing a series of events perhaps 1% as traumatic as a real abduction, letting you fill in the other possibilities with your imagination. They chose a child actor for the abducted child, Leslie, who had no skill at acting at all. She is not in the least convincing, which makes her performance unreal, sort of a Kabuki telling of a story rather than a realistic re-enacting of events.
Certain things made no sense. Young Leslie is hopelessly naive. No child of her age could be that unaware of the dangers of interacting with strangers. The abductors do a dry run and release Leslie to identify them. That makes absolutely no sense.
Later we see Leslie as a teen. She smokes. She is addicted to cocaine. She is a hooker and a pimp. She treats her friends with contempt. She lives in squalor. She has a general screw-you to everyone and everything. The only bright spot in her life is a boy, Donny, who was abducted around the same time she was who has maintained his devotion to her, even though she spits on him.
A counselor (John Malkovich) figures out who she is and arranges a visit home to be reunited with her parents. The family is like the Ward and June Cleavers. She feels too soiled to fit in and leaves in the middle of the night without leaving word. And the movie ended.
I could not decipher what she planned to do next -- try to find her boyfriend, take up hooking again, something else? I did not really care. She had become such a selfish monster.
You saw no transition from the lamb-like abducted child to the hard- boiled hooker. They seemed two completely unrelated people. If someone were to make another film with a similar theme, they should fill in some of the transition.
Though he gets top billing, Malkovich has only a bit part, most of which he spends reading forms aloud.
This movie tackles the problem by showing a series of events perhaps 1% as traumatic as a real abduction, letting you fill in the other possibilities with your imagination. They chose a child actor for the abducted child, Leslie, who had no skill at acting at all. She is not in the least convincing, which makes her performance unreal, sort of a Kabuki telling of a story rather than a realistic re-enacting of events.
Certain things made no sense. Young Leslie is hopelessly naive. No child of her age could be that unaware of the dangers of interacting with strangers. The abductors do a dry run and release Leslie to identify them. That makes absolutely no sense.
Later we see Leslie as a teen. She smokes. She is addicted to cocaine. She is a hooker and a pimp. She treats her friends with contempt. She lives in squalor. She has a general screw-you to everyone and everything. The only bright spot in her life is a boy, Donny, who was abducted around the same time she was who has maintained his devotion to her, even though she spits on him.
A counselor (John Malkovich) figures out who she is and arranges a visit home to be reunited with her parents. The family is like the Ward and June Cleavers. She feels too soiled to fit in and leaves in the middle of the night without leaving word. And the movie ended.
I could not decipher what she planned to do next -- try to find her boyfriend, take up hooking again, something else? I did not really care. She had become such a selfish monster.
You saw no transition from the lamb-like abducted child to the hard- boiled hooker. They seemed two completely unrelated people. If someone were to make another film with a similar theme, they should fill in some of the transition.
Though he gets top billing, Malkovich has only a bit part, most of which he spends reading forms aloud.