The Missing

For the first half of this western, it looks like director Ron Howard is at the top of his game. Then things go very wrong. Cate Blanchett does some good work as a frontier mom whose daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) is kidnapped by an Apache witch doctor. Tommy Lee Jones, decked out in some bitching hair extensions that are perhaps too tidy for period authenticity, shows up to help track his granddaughter. The film achieves a certain creepiness in its first half, but an unnecessary turn towards the supernatural is goofy. Howard also tries too hard to keep things politically correct, and the film goes from feeling real to feeling fabricated. Too bad because it looks good, and it’s well acted. Howard’s second kidnapping film after Ransom.