Movie Review: MISSING...

A few hours ago, I watched the dramatic thriller Missing at AMC theaters.

An unofficial sequel to the 2018 film Searching (which starred John Cho and Debra Messing), Missing is about an 18-year-old girl named June (Storm Reid) who uses every online tool at her disposal to find her mother Grace (Nia Long)...who suddenly disappeared when she was supposed to be on vacation in Colombia.

Missing was both very clever and pretty suspenseful—with the clever part due to June's ability to figure out the passwords to the Gmail accounts of both Grace and her boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung)...and to do other things like pinpointing (from June's home in Southern California) the locations of surveillance cameras at the Colombian hotel where Grace was staying at. With the exception of actual apps and websites like WhatsApp, Taskrabbit and Gmail, I'm wondering how many of the other sites that June used to locate her mom really existed.

Either way, June was so brilliant at using social media and other online sites to find private information about various people that there should be another sequel, or spinoff flick, where she grew up to become a computer hacker working for the CIA! No seriously.

(Well okay, maybe not the CIA... That's such an overused trope in Hollywood movies.)

The suspenseful part of Missing came from all of the amazing plot twists that dot the film. I'm not going to spoil things here, but just when you thought that June finally discovered where her mom was, Missing threw the audience for a loop.

Missing had some amazing twists... Not as amazing as the twist at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects, but still great nonetheless.

The only downer in Missing was the climax itself; not that it wasn't good, but because it's here where the film switches from being an intriguing, 111-minute take on social media and other forms of Web technology to being a serious statement about spousal abuse and domestic violence. Such a bummer.

Overlooking the climax, ironically, Missing was still a great ride that showed the audience what can be found if you sleuthed through the Internet hard enough. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to the moviegoers to decide.