The Missing 2003
This is a big pretty movie with a gritty plot and cast. Not your typical western in that it centers around a woman and her daughters and throws in some Indian witchcraft. Tommy Lee Jones plays a grizzled old guy who has “gone native” to a T. Cate Blanchett is strong as a determined woman dead set on getting her daughter back from Indians who kidnapped her. The main bad guy is pretty scary. Ron Howard throws in some great scenery, mostly of the desert in the winter. It is stark but also beautiful, not the sunny monument valley stuff of old-fashioned westerns.
As I was watching it I could see how some people would say this was a great movie western and it reminded me a lot of Unforgiven in its atypical and bleak approach. But I can also see the movie as being kind of hollow and more along the lines of the Tom and Nicole epic Far and Away. Most westerns are about bigger ideas (subjugation of the Indians, the end of the open range, truth, justice, etc.) but this is essentially a movie about good guys following bad guys and leading up to the expected big confrontations. They throw in a couple of nice nuggets about a town that is more interested in hosting a fair than hunting bandits and an army that is more interested in looting and shipping Indians out of the west than it is in bringing outlaws to justice, but essentially it’s a long drawn out story of these people tracking down the bad guys.
I think the movie was probably too long and some developments seemed kind of forced. Plus there is the squeamish aspect that it centers around murdering innocent people and kidnapping the daughters to potentially rape them and sell them into prostitution and slavery. So I can also see how people would be disappointed. But I thought it was good (and westerns are hard to come by lately) and if you’re patient you could enjoy it too.
I’ll give it a B.