★ 7 / 10
This movie will not steal your time
adi_2002
Tom just lost his son after a moment of inattention while they were in a restaurant. At a construction site near by it's found a dead body of a child and Tom…
Tom just lost his son after a moment of inattention while they were in a restaurant. At a construction site near by it's found a dead body of a child and Tom thinks that it is his son. Being a detective he deeps more in this case and it leads him to another child abduction and murder that happened fifty years ago.A beautiful and at the same time a sad story told from two points of view, one from the present and the other from the '50. The crossing makes the movie watchable and the fact that they are connected makes the movie even more intriguing. It's almost impossible not to share a tear after and the original story could make us to forget about the little flaws. An unique film that deserves your time.
★ 5 / 10
A terrific premise and solid acting are marred by painfully weak scripting and art direction.
embo66
Just caught this on Sundance, where it was billed as a "taut thriller." Since it featured Jon Hamm and Josh Lucas, things sounded very promising. To be fair…
Just caught this on Sundance, where it was billed as a "taut thriller." Since it featured Jon Hamm and Josh Lucas, things sounded very promising.
To be fair, most of the acting in this flick is pretty good — good enough, in fact, to keep you essentially engrossed throughout, despite the horde of art direction gaffes and plot / characterization holes wide enough to drive a 1958 Chevelle through several times over. Bottom line: This movie has a terrific premise and solid acting, but the painfully weak script keeps it mired in B-movie territory.
Detective Tom Adkins (Hamm) is tormented by guilt for having momentarily left his 10-year-old son alone at their table in an old diner, which leads to the boy getting abducted. Eight years later, the case remains unsolved — and his marriage still deeply troubled by tensions you assume are due to Tommy, Jr.'s disappearance (but that largely go unaddressed). You are told that Tom has been obsessed with the case, spending hours in Jr.'s room and hounding a felon convicted for similar crimes for clues or a confession about his own son.
When the body of a "boy in a box" is found after being buried for 50 years, we begin a VERY long parallel journey with another father, Matthew Wakefield (Lucas), whose youngest son is also abducted and — you guessed it — the two cases wind up being very connected, indeed. Yet we spend far more time back in the 1958 story than in the present; when we are returned to the present day, it's almost as if the director and screenwriter do so just to clumsily move the "these stories are related" bits along before going back to the past with sighs of relief.
There are some fairly skillful visual transitions on screen as we move between the past and present story lines, but the editing techniques are far more adept than the script's.
For one thing, there's just no "thrill" in this "thriller." Although Detective Adkins is ostensibly "investigating" the parallel 50-year-old abduction and murder, most of our knowledge of that older case comes directly from watching it unfold on screen, rather than through any leads Adkins actually unearths. ***SPOILER ALERTS*** Even more maddeningly, the most obvious, early clue — a whistle both boys got from eating at the same diner 50 years apart — isn't even investigated by Adkins until much later in the film. And — for a haunted man who's spent hours over the years in his son's room, staring at all the things he insists be left intact there — it somehow doesn't dawn on Adkins until nearly the end of the movie that the corroded toy found with the dead boy strongly resembles a metal rabbit in Tommy Jr.'s own toy box. Finally, all the foreshadowing with the felon Adkins suspects of being responsible for Tommy's death spoils what little tension surrounds this character.
As for the art direction . . . Well, the 1950s NEVER looked like this! As many, many others here have already noted, the hairstyles worn by every single character in this movie aren't at all contemporary with the period. A central photograph is given a Photoshop "retro" treatment, but still looks wholly contemporary, as do many of the so-called 1950s fashions worn. To complain may sound like carping -- but this laziness in recreating the period we spend so much time in REALLY detracts from 1) your ability to truly sink into the story, and 2) your attempt to respect the filmmakers here. Even some of the dialog and the characters' behavior seem out of sync with 1950s mores and attitudes.
Finally, all the characters in this film (with the possible exception of Matthew Wakefield) are pretty thinly drawn. It's testament to Hamm's acting skills that we understand as much as we do about his misery. But his long-suffering wife remains an utter cipher throughout, as does the character who winds up being the killer of both boys. We all laugh at that "Um, what's my motivation here?" spoof of actors — but these characters sure could have used some! Because without that underlying texture of personality and motive, everything is reduced to simple plot mechanics; you stay with the story not because you really care about these people, but simply because you want to find out who did it.
80%
AUDIENCE
6.1/10
6.3K
•••
Ugly