The Missing Details

After a moderately promising start, director Ron Howard's stab at creating an epic western soon degenerates into a bloated chase movie. Cate Blanchett stars as an unmarried frontier woman whose hard life gets a whole lot harder when her estranged father (played by Tommy Lee Jones) turns up on her doorstep, and her eldest daughter is kidnapped by slave traders led by a native American witch. Blanchett gives an agreeable performance as the anxious mother who is forced to turn to her father to track the girl, while Jones makes the most of his frankly ludicrous role as a mystical wanderer who abandoned his family to live with Apaches. But there's a grinding political correctness to Ken Kaufman's screenplay, with every evil “Injun” counterbalanced by a heroic one, while every white man we meet is either a potential rapist or a coward. It's further hobbled by a laughably earnest dose of native American spiritualism and a villain who looks like he walked straight out of a Wes Craven movie. Some critics have argued that it's what's missing from The Missing that spoils the movie, but the real problem is the slightness and silliness of the little that's there.

Old-fashioned Western with some interesting moments, but it never quite emerges from the great shadow cast by John Ford's The Searchers on a similar theme.