Don’t F**k with Cats was one of the strangest pieces of media to ever reach the pinnacle of pop culture discussion. It was an odd miniseries that was about a group of internet sleuths trying to figure out who was posting videos of cats being murdered. They picked up on the smallest of details to slowly figure out who this guy was that was murdering the cats. It was the first time, that I remember seeing the internet being used in such an in-depth and wild way. So when I saw Missing, and it basically took place all on screens with a girl trying to solve a crime, mainly that on a laptop, the only thing I could think about was Don’t F**k with Cats.
June is a teen, who lives with her widowed mom, and her mom, Grace, is dating someone new, Kevin, and they are going on a trip to Colombia for a fun vacation. While they are gone, June throws a party with her friends, and the next morning she is supposed to pick up her mom and Kevin from the airport. She wakes up late, and when she gets to the airport, she cannot find her mom. She waits and waits, but they never show up. June receives no messages or any form of communication from her mom or Kevin with any explanation, so like any normal person in this situation, she starts to panic. June calls Heather, a family friend, who is a lawyer, for help. There was not much help from Heather, or from the U.S embassy in Colombia. So June took the investigation into her own hands, and she started to find different ways to try and solve where her mother was, and she basically does it all through internet searches. She hires a local Colombian, Javi, who helps with the feet on the ground work, and she uses live camera feeds, and a variety of other online methods to get closer to solving the mystery.
So story wise, I mentioned that this reminded me of Don’t F**k with Cats, but it also has some other relatives that it can lean on as well. One of big ones is Host. Host is a zoom horror movie, where friends have a meet up online, and they hire a medium to conduct an online séance. Obviously, the séance goes wrong, and the horror all takes place on a zoom screen. It also could be compared to the less successful version of Host, Unfriended, another zoom horror film. Both are very similar to this film, but this one has some more added elements to it. In the others, they just have the zoom screen the whole time, but in this one, they have the live video screen up often, but they are also pulling up internet tabs, and they use live video feeds of different places. June face times people. So it truly feels like you are watching a giant laptop screen for almost two hours.
One question I am still asking is does this concept work, and does it work in an almost two-hour long format. In the other films similar to this, the two aforementioned, and also Deadstream and Dashcam, which are both movies in the form of livestreamed YouTube shows, the movies are less than Ninety minutes, and of these Host is the best, and it does not even last 70 minutes. It is nice and neat, and tightly rapped into an anxiety filled hour. So it seems like the formula for these movies is at max ninety minutes, but this tried to subvert those expectations, and it ended up hurting it. It is not fun to sit and watch a laptop screen and live streams from cameras with different windows constantly popping up for over one hundred minutes.
Regal does a special Monday Night Mystery Movie sometimes, where they pick a movie that is going to come out soon, and they release it a couple of weeks early. They even got some of the people involved in the movie to make a video to lead into the film, and the director and the actors both lauded the twists and turns in the movie. A hallmark of a good mystery is good twists, and when the cast and director are promising, then they better deliver, and I do think that they did a good job. There were definitely unexpected twists, but there was one weakness with the twists, and that was the amount of time that they let the audience believe in the twists.
It felt like there was a twenty-minute period where they would reveal a twist, and a couple minutes later, they would drop another twist, and then a couple minutes later another one. It felt like there was not enough time to digest what they just alluded too. Great mysteries give the audience plenty of time to speculate based on a twist, this one did not give the audience that leeway. They wasted too much time at the start of the movie setting up relationships and throwing a party, but if they took those scenes out or shortened them, then they could have dwelled on some of the twists more, or they could have shortened the movie to make it a closer length to the others made in the same format.
This was a good movie; it did keep me on the edge of my seat. It also benefited from being a special screening. There was a theater full of people there to watch the movie, despite the College Football Championship being that night, and they seemed to be enjoying the movie as well. They promised twists, and they delivered, there were multiple things that I did not see coming, but they did need to let some of the twists breath to build the suspense more. Ken Leung did seem to be the perfect person to play Kevin, a weird guy on a dating app that seems like he is hiding something, and the guy who was playing Javi really stole the show. It is a fun movie, and I do recommend going to see it. I gave it 3.5 Stars initially, but moved it to a 3, I got caught up in the full theater hype.
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