Back in 2018, Searching came out. It was a fairly simple premise: a single dad is frantically looking for his missing teenage daughter. However, the movie had a neat gimmick going: everything that was on-screen took place on someone’s computer screen. Email checks, videochat calls, news reports online, and the like made up the entirety of the movie, and it rarely had to stretch that premise to make it work while still delivering what I thought was a fairly taut and entertaining thriller, with a solid lead performance by John Cho. Heck, when my niece graduated from high school while showing an interest in thrillers and mystery movies, I got a few DVDs of recent movies of the genre and made sure I included Searching. Now it’s 2023, and the filmmakers have another movie with a similar premise and the same gimmick.
Would I find Missing as entertaining as I did Searching?
18 year old June “Junebug” Allen (Storm Reid) is largely embarrassed and put upon by her widowed mother Grace (Nia Long). Grace is about to head out for a romantic week’s vacation with her new boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung) to Columbia, leaving June home alone. But when the time comes to pick the pair up at the airport, June has a problem: her mother didn’t come home, and June doesn’t have much in the way of resources to search in Columbia. The FBI agent working out of the US Embassy (Daniel Henney) can only do so much due to a general lack of cooperation between the American and Columbian government, and Grace’s best friend and lawyer Heather (Amy Landecker) wants June to just sit put and let law enforcement do what it can.
But there isn’t much of a movie if June does that, so instead she uses her own knowledge of how to use a computer and what little money she has to do a bit of light hacking and even hiring an older man in Columbia named Javier (Joaquim de Almeida) to run errands for her and even offer some good advice when he can. But it turns out that Kevin and Grace both had some secrets that June was unaware of, and that just makes both parties look more suspicious to both the authorities and various people following the case on social media. Can June find her mom before it’s too late?
Like with Searching, the movie does more or less follow the same gimmick that everything takes place on a computer screen. If anything, it may be a little unclear whose screen it is, and it may be more than one, but yes, it’s all on a computer screen as June engages with social media, checks contacts, hacks email accounts, and whatever else she has to do to try to figure out what happened. In point of fact, the movie reveals in the opening minutes that Missing is actually some sort of spin-off/sequel to Searching. It’s not quite as good as I remember Searching being, but it was tense when it needed to be and only felt like it was stretching what technology can do a little bit, but not enough to knock me completely out of the movie.
As for the performances, I think Reid acquitted herself quite well here, but I really enjoyed the sort of general charm and good nature that de Almeida brought to Javier. Quite frankly, while I doubt this will make my “best of” list for this year, it was a fairly solid movie. I’m not sure why this was a January release, frankly. It felt more like a good March-April or even late August-September release. But here it is, and between this and M3GAN, it’s been a fairly entertaining year at the movie so far. If this is the worst movie I see in theaters this year…well, it may just mean I went less often than I have in the past. In the meantime, I’m having a good time when I hit the multiplex. Let’s see how long that lasts.
Grade: B-
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