Mark Reviews Movies: THE VANISHED

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 20, 2020

Between the lead characters and the filmmakers, it's difficult to tell which group makes the more irresponsible, unthinking, and terrible decisions. By the end of The Vanished, the main characters at least have an excuse. As for the filmmakers, they don't, and the ending, which does put some of the characters' irrational choices into a context that superficially explains the irrational behavior, probably makes writer/director Peter Facinelli the winner of this losing game.

The premise is so simple that it's rather astonishing how badly the movie mucks up almost everything about it. A seemingly happy family is heading to a lakeside RV park for a fishing trip. Husband Paul (Thomas Jane) and wife Wendy (Anne Heche) are happily chatting in front, and their young daughter Taylor (played by Kk and Sadie Heim) is happily singing a song about bottles of beer in the back (The song somehow plays into the movie's big twist, and when one remembers how much of the song Taylor sings at the beginning, that part of the reveal might be the most unlikely of the many unlikely things about the finale).

Shortly after arriving at the park, the parents are distracted—her by shopping and him by temporary neighbor Miranda (Aleksei Archer) in a bikini. Taylor goes missing. Sheriff Baker (Jason Patric) arrives, makes some promises, and tells the parents about an escaped convict in the nearby woods. Paul and Wendy should leave the investigation to the professionals.

The suspects, of course, are limited. There's the fugitive. There are the neighbors, the distracting woman and her conveniently absent-at-the-time husband Eric (Kristopher Wente), who have a medicine cabinet filled with circumstantial evidence. There's park owner Tom (John D. Hickman), who's keeping something—or maybe someone—hidden behind a locked door, and the park's groundskeeper Justin (Alex Haydon) constantly drives around in a cart, looking suspicious, and interacting with the socially awkward manner of some really ill-advised comic relief.

As for the cops, Baker seems sincere but is also an alcoholic in a crumbled marriage (There's a moment of intended pathos, in which the sheriff despondently tears at a wrapped present, but the scene is laughably undone by how little concern the movie has for this particular relationship, how the act finally leads him to notice a clue he has had from the start, and the actual thing underneath the wrapping paper, which definitely doesn't match the anticipated emotion of the scene). The director appears as a deputy whose advice to call in the feds goes unheeded, but one imagines it wouldn't help. These cops have to miss everything that's right in front of them for any of the plot to proceed.

Facinelli's goal is a thriller about how far these desperate parents are willing to go in order to find their daughter. It fails almost immediately and utterly, when Paul and Wendy head out into the woods, find a man they think is the escaped convict, and end up shooting him with his own pistol (For some reason, they don't alert the police, and somehow, the cops, who have set up an extensive search of the forest, miss the man and take their sweet time responding to a gunshot, when they know an armed fugitive is on the loose). Wendy feels guilty, but Paul wants to protect her—especially after it's discovered that the man wasn't the convict.

The game here almost seems as if Facinelli is trying to create as high a body count as possible without his main characters being caught. All of it is unbelievable, and Jane and Heche's over-the-top performances certainly don't help matters. Jane plays his desperate father and morally questionable husband as an unhinged man, prone to extreme shifts in mood and personality (He actually gives up entirely on the search after three days—and as many killings). Heche's character—a guilt-ridden killer, frustrated wife, and despairing mother—can only be described as hysterical—in the original, sexist meaning of the word. These may be embarrassing performances, but considering how often Facinelli shifts tones in such ungainly ways, one strongly suspects on whom the blame for those performances should be placed.

The ludicrous, insulting ending pretty much confirms that suspicion (The problem, as it turns out, is that Facinelli has the actors playing for the big reveal, not for the plot as we see it). The Vanished is wildly and weirdly incompetent, featuring one miscalculation after another, after another, and after another. It's an embarrassment of a movie.

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