The Missing: Critic Reviews

What's missing in The Missing -- despite throwing in The Everything, from magic trinkets to group hugs -- is soul.

Apparently the only thing tougher than endurance on the frontier is sitting through a movie about endurance on the frontier -- at least that is the point The Missing seems determined to make.

An admirably solid effort.

In The Missing, Ron Howard somehow makes a great movie and an awful movie, all at the same time.

The Missing hews in every way to the conventions of its genre.

The Missing is well made, suspenseful, and superlatively acted for the most part, but its harshness never feels organic to the tale. What should be devastating is just terribly unpleasant.

However bogged down by predictable story rhythms, banally assembled shoot-outs, and climactic mano a mano, The Missing has an acidic period tone, a respect for the reality of violence, and a refreshing dearth of superhuman heroics and easy triumph.

A big snooze because we can't take the main characters seriously.

There are some Western themes and principles you can't fiddle with. Thankfully, when it counted most, Howard didn't try.

A superbly crafted curiosity piece.

A terrific setup, full of inviting genre familiarity and modern tension, borrowed from the novel of the same name. And then, as that mouthy teenager goes lost in an Apache raid, so does the movie itself.

It's such a preposterous setup that I was always aware of the plot chugging away, and the logistics of the chase defy all common sense.

The best and toughest western since Unforgiven.

Easily the best western of 2003.

A taut, intriguing, expertly crafted tale reminiscent of John Ford's classic The Searchers.

The Missing is an absolute knockout, a western, a chase movie, an epic and the story of a splintered family and two civilizations at odds.

There's a pretty good Western hidden somewhere amid the extraneous scenes, unnecessary characters and adoring shots of the New Mexico wilderness, but Howard didn't have the heart to cut his movie.

Mr. Howard keeps the emotional temperature of the family reunion as chilly as possible, but it's clear that the father-daughter relationship is the core of the drama, and the rest is all time-consuming digressions.

The rawest, scariest, most nerve-rattling saddlebags-and- sagebrush saga since Robert Mulligan's The Stalking Moon.

As hard as it may be to reconcile this as the work of the same director who made How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the fact remains that Ron Howard has never before made a picture this raw and alive.

A good, though not great, contribution to the genre.

The Missing is often entertaining. But plainly something more was aimed for, and incredibly simple, basic missteps keep the film from reaching the next level.

At once racially fearful, and anxiously apologetic, patriarchal and post-feminist, pacifist and trigger-happy -- The Missing is engaged in one big, long desert showdown with itself.