Every now and then, a bad film comes along that’s worth watching simply in order to marvel at its stunning ineptitude. Some combination of outlandish plot, wooden script, flailing actors or misguided twist can find that sweet spot that conjures entertainment value from a rubbish heap. The Vanished ticks a lot of those boxes, even if a missing-kid storyline is too rote to offer outright spectacle. Writer-director Peter Facinelli’s film seems more intent on bending over backwards to strain credulity.
Not even usually competent actors like Anne Heche and Thomas Jane can breathe any life into the film’s rigid characters. The disappearance of little girl Taylor (Sadie and Kk Heim) acts primarily as a MacGuffin, a subject for married couple Wendy (Heche) and Paul (Jane) to bicker about while sitting around their pimped-out RV for days on end and waiting for something to happen. They do have a few deep-seated issues to fight about, as it’s revealed that Paul has a philandering past, and, well, he was flirting with the cute young neighboring camper (Aleksei Archer) when Taylor went missing. The search party, led by squinty, cowboy-hat-clad Sheriff Baker (Jason Patric), doesn’t exhibit much sense of urgency either, seemingly reserving their time spent combing the woods for the middle of the night rather than during broad daylight. Meanwhile, the Sheriff, when he isn’t playing the tough-guy act with a local tweaker who serves as the campground’s groundskeeper (Alex Haydon), gets staggeringly drunk and shoots glass bottles dangling from strings while his disapproving wife (Rebecca Lines) shakes her head in the background.
Wendy and Paul eventually take matters into their own hands and incidentally stumble into violent scenarios with no basis in plausible reality. As the film slogs along—many scenes are laboriously paced to the point we simply want anything of consequence to happen—the married couple becomes more villainous than victimized, which feels far more contrived than it does edgy. And yet, if a viewer is game enough, there’s some entertainment value in watching this couple act like losing a daughter is no big whoop and make exactly the wrong decision at nearly every turn. And don’t forget the sheriff who sits on his hands as the bodies pile up. There’s a creepy pedophile angle thrown in to amp up the stakes, a melodramatic side-plot involving the sheriff and his wife’s marriage, some voyeurism to add a little spice and some dream sequence fake-outs in case a dozen red herrings aren’t enough deception for you.
All this leads up to a Shyamalanian ending, a gimmick that negates large swaths of what came before rather than fits the pieces together. Such an audacious reach would be commendable but for the fact that swinging for the fences in the bottom of the ninth doesn’t really matter when you’re down by 10 runs. Astonishing in its banality, and despite the unintentional comedy involved in watching a couple do inexplicable things like throw away their missing child’s possessions after she’s been missing five days, The Vanished gives the viewer little reason to stick this one out until the payoff.
The post The Vanished appeared first on Spectrum Culture.