Missing is the newest film from Sony Pictures directed by Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick, being a non-direct sequel to Searching, Missing follows the story of June, played by Storm Reid, when her mother Grace, played by Nia Long, disappears during the holidays.
In Colombia with her new boyfriend Kevin played by Ken Leung, but trapped thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her disposal to try to find her before it’s too late. However, as she delves deeper, her digital investigation soon raises more questions than answers. Missing is a film with a curious proposal, the film follows the style used in Searching but it is still something new, this camera style, where the whole film takes place inside a phone, Ipad, Computer, etc. very original and rare to see in cinema nowadays. Something I felt a lot while watching the film is how important a father or mother is and how they make a difference on someone’s life, and you realize how important she was only when she lost her, the character of June is a proof of that, a girl who never gave so much attention to her mother, and her father had already died when she was a child, June is a very rigid person to herself perhaps due to the absence that her father makes her, but also June is a person not very mature that when she leaves her trip at Colombia, automatically she makes a party at her house.
The film has a few things that end up bothering me quite a bit, which would be the part where the character played by Joaquim de Almeida called Javi, who is a poor resident of Colombia who works for a house cleaning application, the moment Javi is introduced in the movie he starts off being a comic relief, being a colombian guy who doesn’t speak very good english, from that moment on in the movie he starts to go downhill and you automatically have to disbelieve everything that’s going on and also turn off your suspension of disbelief to believe that a simple resident of Colombia would help you investigate the disappearance of the mother of a girl he never saw in his entire life. The only difference between these two films in the franchise, Searching really had a little believability that made you well on the thought that all that story passed throughout the film could happen to literally anyone as opposed to, something I don’t feel here in Missing where the film has several and several revelations during its excessive and unnecessary long duration of 1 hour and 51 minutes, I think that if the film did not have a lot of unnecessary plot twists that do not make the least bit of logic, it would not even be possible to shorten the film to 1 hour and a half easily. As I said earlier, the amount of excessive twists in the film make the film frantic but it is not something I like, the first act of Missing is the best act in the film where you can see the realism and you even get anxious and distressed in the edge of the seat to find out what will happen and find out how her mother mysteriously disappeared, the second act of the film still manages to amuse even though it is totally abnormal some twists that it has in it but even so it manages to be a fun act, already in the third and last act of the movie that and where it totally loses itself from being a mystery movie to being a totally different movie with even action involved in it at a silly level of unpretentiousness the movie turns out to be. Another positive point of Missing is to see how the internet ended up being progressed and developed over time compared to Searching where you see teenagers with several and several applications between quotes “new” like Tik Tok and even the comparison to Tinder in some movie moments.
The humor of the film, as I said, ends up being for Javi, which ends up being a relative humor, which is a type of humor that I really like a lot because I have a Brazilian family, I really see the relationship between some of my relatives and relatives with Javi. My final balance for Missing ends up being positive even more so for the cast even though I think that some characters are totally disposable like June’s best friend, Veena played by Megan Suri and also a boy who loses a watch in June’s house who ends up being less important than the watch itself that is actually used in the main plot of the film, but apart from these issues I really loved the cast because they have a lot of charisma and especially for the actress of June, who manages to demonstrate enough emotional weight to know how to lose one mother and try as much as possible to find her again.
Rating: 65%
