Is there a particular word in the English language for when you watch a movie with the quiet hope that this time, the star you once admired will drag herself out of direct-to-video purgatory and surprise you? If there is, “Stolen Girl” killed it dead. It’s the sort of film that leaves you looking at the title and wishing it applied to your ticket money.
The premise, at least on paper, winks at the grand Hollywood tradition: a true-crime abduction, a ten-year odyssey, a mother’s hellbent journey to recover her child, and somewhere, a shadow brokerage of international retrieval specialists lurking in the dark. One could imagine this as Fraught Maternal Melodrama meets Underworld Espionage, a grab bag of genres that, handled with wit or an ounce of human complexity. Instead, we have Kate Beckinsale gliding through, looking for all the world like Erin Brockovich, while Scott Eastwood, in the sort of role you’d expect to find in the bundle with a new TV, tries very hard to be his father but manages only to summon the haunted blankness of a man just shown the real script.
What happened to Beckinsale? Once she was a fiercely intelligent, playful presence even in something as inane as “Underworld” you could sense she was in on the joke. Here she seems sedated by the screenplay, numbed into making even her big maternal breakdowns feel forced, every line of dialogue read as if she were rehearsing it in the car on the way to set. Maybe it’s the script, which clatters and clangs like a fax machine in a wind tunnel; maybe it’s the direction, which confuses inertia for style and hands us, in lieu of suspense, scene after limp scene of people frowning grimly at laptops, interspersed with time jumps so sloppy you’ll think the projectionist skipped a reel.
“Stolen Girl” wants you to feel something, anything, about Maureen’s pursuit, but it’s so terrified of holding still for a moment of honesty that it airlifts in subplots about governmental corruption, shady networks, and the all-purpose boogeyman of "the Muslim Brotherhood," as if spicing up a stew so flavorless it would send Anthony Bourdain to Xanax. The result is a film that aspires to expose the machinery of institutional injustice, only to use it as a threadbare excuse for a by-the-numbers kidnapping drama. It tries to be real, real in the sense of “based on true events,” and real in the sense of flat, arrhythmic human interaction but never manages to be more than a dramatization on the Discovery Channel stretched to feature length.
Somewhere underneath the rubble of plot contrivances, filler, and ridiculous expository dialogue, there are threads of genuine pathos: the dilemma between a parent and a child who has been changed by years apart, the recognition that rescue may not mean redemption. But these moments are stilted, undercut by a production that doesn’t trust its own story. The movie can’t decide what it wants to be, is it an action thriller, is it a psychological drama, is it a meditation on time and loss? In the end it’s none of those, just an endless slog through kidnapping-plot quicksand. The editor seems to be ticking off boxes on an outline: Here’s the confrontation, here (after a gap of indeterminate years) is the “twist,” and here is the ending the audience guessed two hours ago.
Eastwood, meanwhile, is the sort of sturdy, unremarkable presence that makes you long for the days when second-generation stars brought something, anything, to the screen besides a jawline and a surname. As for the supporting cast, they're barely given enough to embarrass themselves. The most compelling character in the film is Syria, which is as faceless and rubber-stamped as if conjured out of the CIA's fantasy portfolio, the “threat” is all background, and not for a moment does it feel dangerous or alive.
If I sound harsh, it’s because films like this squander the little trust left in the mid-level adult thriller and squander Beckinsale, whose uneven career needs a real shot of adrenaline, not another whiff of straight-to-streaming mediocrity. Stolen Girl is slightly less disastrous than last year's Canary Black, hardly a compliment, unless you grade on a curve where the low point is six feet under. There are a handful of scenes that may tug, momentarily, at your sympathies, but you’ll be jolted out of them by an unnecessary subplot, a muddled time jump, or, most likely a line reading so empty it ricochets around the theater.
The whole enterprise is less a movie than a cautionary tale about the dangers of confusing a “great story” with a good script, and trauma with tedium. You watch “Stolen Girl” and long for someone, anyone, to steal you away from it.
