DVD Review: The Missing

There's a scene in Ron Howard's The Missing that really unnerved me. It comes about half-way through the movie, and it just sort-of snuck up on me. Here's the setup: It's the 1880's, and a band of outlaws has taken a group of women hostage. They plan to take them to Mexico and sell them into slavery. They've also taken a photographer hostage, and they're forcing him to take pictures of them and their quarry. The women are tied up in a cave, and the outlaws are posing with them like big-game hunters, gloating over their kills. It's during this scene that we first see the leader of the band of outlaws, and boy is he ever ugly. I'm talking about big-time ugly; ugly and evil and kind of stupid-looking, too. The worst of all possible combinations.

It was during this scene that I realized that The Missing was really freaking me out. I think that what's amazing about this is that before we ever got to this scene, We'd already seen as much violence and brutality as you might in just about any other ten movies combined. Nasty stuff, too: severed heads, gutted animals, a man shot with arrows, stripped, and left naked and dead in the cold. Uuugh. All of that, and now a group of women, gagged and bound and photographed for the amusement of their captors. I went into The Missing expecting a fairly basic western. What I got instead was one of the most genuinely creepy movies I've seen in a long while.

The fact that I kept watching The Missing even after I realized that I was good and freaked out is, I suppose, a testimony to the movie itself. For a movie to hold my interest in spite of all that brutality, there better be something there that redeems it. Thankfully, there was redemption to be found in The Missing.

Here's the story in a nutshell: Cate Blanchett plays Maggie Gilkeson, a fronterwoman who makes her living as an amateur surgeon, doctor, and dentist. She lives with her boyfriend and two daughters; the girly, prissy teenager Lilly and the fearless tomboy Dot. Maggie's estranged father, a white man who lives with and emulates the native Americans, passes through. He's played by Tommy Lee Jones. Maggie hasn't seen Papa in years, and doesn't really want anything to do with him... until a group of maniacs kills her boyfriend and hired hand and takes Lilly hostage. At that, Maggie and Papa enter into a shaky truce and agree to work together to track down Lilly and rescue her from the maniacs who've captured her.

Part of what kept me watching is that I love Cate Blanchett. She won me over in a big way in Elizabeth, and I've enjoyed her in everything she's done sense. Sometimes she's the only thing I enjoy in a movie, but she's always reliably strong in even the flimsiest of vehicles.

Another thing that kept me watching was Tommy Lee Jones. Hey, with TLJ, either you're a fan or your not. Either you enjoy him or you don't. I enjoy him. TLJ is like Nick Nolte in a way... he basically always plays himself. It doesn't matter if Nick Nolte is playing the Hulk's father or Eddie Murphy's partner or Thomas Jefferson: With Nick Nolte, what you always get is Nick Nolte. Either you like him or you don't. Well, I like Nolte, and I like Tommy Lee Jones, too... even though it doesn't matter if he's playing a U.S. Marshall or a Man In Black or a comic book villain. With Tommy Lee Jones, what you always get is Tommy Lee Jones. I'm cool with that.

In The Missing you get to see Tommy Lee Jones dance around and talk like an indian, and I enjoyed that. You also get to see Cate Blanchett doing some things I'd never seen her do before, like use an outhouse and yank the last tooth out of the mouth of an elderly Mexican woman. All of that is every bit as entertaining as it sounds, and it kept me watching. But what REALLY kept me watching was Eric Schweig as El Brujo, the movie's bad guy. This was, in all honesty, one of the flat-out creepiest bad guys I've seen in a movie in a long time.

El Brujo is a renegade Apache who's most recently been employed by the US Army as a scout who helps soldiers track down other Apaches. He is butt ugly. If you look up "Butt Ugly" in the dictionary, it says "see El Brujo." He kinda looks like Blackie Lawless of the heavy metal band W*A*S*P... except El Brujo really is as scary as Black always tried to be. He's skilled in black magic and witchcraft, and if he hasn't made a deal with the devil, the only possible reason is that he is the devil, himself. El Brujo is nasty. He plays with rattlesnakes and milks their venom to poison the tips of his weapons. He pulls hair from a hairbrush and uses it to cast spells. He attacks women with the severed claws of eagles. He blows poison dust into peoples eyes; poison dust that blinds them and makes their eyes bleed. He shovels dirt into the mouths of his victims. El Brujo is a real bastard, and the main reason I kept watching The Missing was because I wanted to see somebody take the bastard out. Preferably Tommy Lee, but anyone would do. It didn't take much more than the scene in the cave with the photographer to make me hate him.

By the way, I looked him up and I was glad to see that Eric Schweig doesn't look anything at all like El Brujo in real life. In real life, Schweig kinda looks like a history teacher. That's good.

I won't give away the ending, but I'll say that it's a safe bet that there'll never be a sequel called The Missing: El Brujo Rides Again. You'll have to watch the movie to see why. And, really, you could do a lot worse. Next time you're looking for a good "guy movie" with a villain you'll really hate, an old favorites like Tommy Lee Jones, and even a fun cameo that you'll never see coming (SPOILER), check out The Missing.




  ¶ 4:04 AM