AMBER ALERT (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Amber Alert, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 26, 2024

Thrillers about children in peril are always discomforting, beyond the subject matter and raising questions about the potentially exploitative nature of using such ideas as a means of entertainment. Co-writer/director Kerry Bellessa's Amber Alert eventually bypasses such questions, simply because the movie does become blatantly exploitative, while also being pretty dumb.

One could give credit to Bellessa and co-screenwriter Joshua Oram for devising a fairly clever premise for his kind of thriller, although that wouldn't be accurate. This is actually a remake of the filmmaker's 2012 movie with the same title, which took the idea of ordinary people chasing a possible child abductor and turned it into a found-footage annoyance. This version is better, but that's not saying much.

The everyday folks who happen upon a car matching the description of an Amber Alert in Louisville are Jaq (Hayden Panettiere) and Shane (Tyler James Williams). She's a generic professional, leaving work and racing to get to a blind date on time, and he's a ride-share driver, who should be finished with his shift and on his way to see his son for the kid's birthday. Jaq offers to pay him cash to bring her to her date, and Shane can't turn down the money.

Before this setup, Bellessa follows a dark car with tinted windows, as its driver stalks the quiet streets of various suburbs. Moments such as this one are where the concerns about exploitation are most obvious.

What are we supposed to be feeling with this sequence? It's suspense, obviously, on a narrative level, as well as worry on a human one, but as the car passes by kids and is scared off when a random woman appears just before the guy almost nabs on little girl, the movie is toying with the humanity of the audience. It feels uncomfortable just watching for some kid to be taken, waiting for that inevitable inciting incident of a thriller to happen, and wondering which child will have to endure what the movie has in store.

A child is abducted, lured into the car with a large doll, as the girl's mother (played by Katie McClellan) is momentarily distracted. The mother's distraught, of course, leading her to call emergency services, where the operator (played by Saidah Arrika Ekulona) quickly informs Sgt. Casey (Kevin Dunn), the police official on duty. The only clues they have to find the girl and catch the perpetrator are the make, model, and color of a car that's one of most popular in the country.

Admittedly, there's a stretch of the movie that almost works. Jaq and Shane receive the alert on their cellphones, and sure enough, she spots a car that matches the description. He's skeptical, but then, the alert, with the description of the car, appears on a road sign above a stoplight. The suspicious car blows a red light and speeds away, and that's enough for the pair to decide to follow it.

The long chase has a certain impromptu cunning to it. Shane tries to navigate how to follow the car without being spotted, and after Jaq is dismissed by the 9-1-1- operator (The cop puts her alone in charge of all the incoming calls, which feels like terrible police work but a decent method of keeping the protagonists' pursuit going), she decides to become more active in investigating the car and its driver. The two have to figure out how to look in the car and, using a wireless earbud connected to Jaq's phone, listen to what's happening inside it after she spots a child's legs through a window.

After that bit of detective work, the plot becomes filled with contrivances—more than are already here—and displays of characters seeming to go out of their way to add complications. There's a confrontation with the driver (played by Kurt Oberhaus) that destroys any sense of mystery for us and suggests neither Jaq nor Shane possesses any degree of self-preservation (They know this man has a gun but let him walk behind them). It all leads to a sneaky climax that constantly contradicts its own stakes, in terms of what the main characters do and don't try (like contacting the cops with an exact location that they've made possible), what the abductor knows and apparently does anyway, and how the basics of timing render the entire episode pointless.

Panettiere and Williams are fine here, regardless of how dunderheaded their characters can be, but a movie as foundationally questionable as Amber Alert needs something to keep us distracted from those questions. Some intelligence might have been preferable to what we actually get.

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