Monday, March 15, 2010

THE VANISHING

The Vanishing Movie Review

Kiefer Sutherland (Stand By Me, The Lost Boys, 24) plays Jeff Harriman, a man who is on vacation with his girlfriend Diane (Sandra Bullock, Premonition, Crash). They stop at a gas station, where Diane is kidnapped by Barney Cousins (Jeff Bridges, The Big Lebowski, Seabiscuit), a strange teacher and family man. Jeff obsesses with finding Diane for three years, hanging posters everywhere, until he meets Rita Baker (Nancy Travis, Becker, Chaplin) and falls in love with her. Eventually he goes back in search for Diane after receiving an offer to write his story of searching for her. Director George Sluizer remakes his 1988 movie of the same name here, and while this film had a lot of potential, it failed to live up to it. Sutherland, who is one of my favorite actors, seems really uninterested in this movie and sort of phones in his performance. I find Travis to be one of the most irritating actresses in Hollywood history and wanted to reach through the screen and choke her in this movie. And here is a sentence I thought I would never say (or type): Jeff Bridges was horrible in this movie.

He's shocked too

I'm not sure what he was going for with his performance of the character but it failed. I did get a bit of joy in a couple scenes where I could say, “hey, I’ve been there!” (parts were filmed in Seattle). The story itself is an interesting one, and I wish it would have focused more on Jeff, less on Barney, and would have cut out Rita entirely. This is not a horrible movie and the original is supposed to be pretty good--maybe I will track that one down.

On A Scale Of One To Ten: 5

The Vanishing Movie Trailer

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