Smoke screens

If you’ve read my laments before, you might’ve picked up on the notion that I can’t stand most found-footage films. I also bitch a lot about movies where the whole damn thing happens on a computer screen, with the director finding cute ways to never cut away from Skype, FaceTime, Words with Friends or whatever the hell a character is doing while the plot unfolds.

Searching is strange, in that I actually almost like the way director Aneesh Chaganty uses computer screens, apps and news reports to tell his story. I also really like the central performance by John Cho as David Kim, a slightly annoying parent who discovers through a break in technological communication that his daughter Margot (Megan La) has gone missing.

What I can’t forgive is the terrible detour the mystery takes into ridiculous, convenient and unimaginative territory. The screenplay really blows it in the end, especially with the help of a stiff and strange performance from Debra Messing as a cop assigned to Margot’s case.

The film’s start is cute enough, with David and Margot having an argument about Margot’s failure to take the trash out. The argument establishes Margot as a generally normal kid, while her father is a bit of a tight-assed paranoiac and kind of a daughter stalker.

David’s over-protective, constant checking in on his daughter and perhaps being a little too involved in her life has something to do with the loss of Pamela (Sara Sohn), his wife and Margot’s mom. Some of the movie’s more touching moments involve David looking at old computer videos of Margot and Pam playing piano.

When Margot still fails to take the trash out, then doesn’t respond to his various texts and call attempts, David starts to get very twitchy. He eventually calls in a missing person’s report, and Detective Vick (Messing) comes on board. This is where the film begins to come apart.

Messing, unlike Cho and La, is unable to come off as a real person using all of these gadgets and technologies to communicate. She comes off more like a big star making a one dimensional cameo on C.S.I.: Bummed Out Cops. She has moments in the movie that are so tonally off that they become funny rather than serious. Messing has been great in past roles, but she is woefully miscast.

That’s not entirely her fault. Anybody being asked to perform the story developments Searching employs in its closing act is being tasked with pulling off some major bullshit. The film takes itself seriously; it’s not any kind of spoof or sly take on social networking and telecommunications. The things happening in this movie are portrayed as very real, likely events. When the story goes off the rails, the movie becomes a lame joke.

Cho and La come through as champs. I actually think I could’ve enjoyed a simple film of these two communicating on their gadgets for one day about normal things, dealing with the loss of Pam, without the missing person element. The performers—and the director—pull off the feat of making FaceTime and iMessage communication in a movie semi-watchable without being too gimmicky, at least for a while. That’s not an easy thing to do.

Searching, in the end, is a movie that could’ve been so much greater, and perhaps an indictment of our over-reliance on gadgets to communicate, if it had veered from the ridiculous. Turns out it’s just a third-rate thriller wrapped up in a snazzy, modern bow. If this story—and its ending—were presented as a straightforward, linear movie absent of Facebook and FaceTime, it would be lambasted. It’s dopey.

It’s not as bad as Unfriended or your average found-footage movie, but Searching is pretty bad all the same. I’m seriously hoping that the existence—and moderate success—of films like this doesn’t have some Hollywood scribes dusting off old, rejected TV scripts thinking they can repackage them as computer screen thrillers. Let’s stop with the computer screen movies, OK? They’re just a tad hokey.