The Missing (2022)

(On TV, November 2022) I’ve been vocal about how BET thrillers are better when they’re crazy, but it turns out that there is a definite limit to the amount of crazy I can tolerate before I start crying foul. It’s one thing to have crazy amplify a familiar plotline, but it’s another to have crazy in order to side step or avoid obvious plotting issues. Director Patricia Cuffie-Jones’s The Missing, unfortunately, uses crazy as a smokescreen and a crutch. A familiar but interesting premise is at the core of the story —an abusive husband masterminding the abduction of his child from his runaway wife. But, in the inept slapdash way BET thrillers are often put together, this one goes the extra mile to be nonsensical. The gratuitously abusive husband thing is one familiar element to take for granted, but then the script goes out of its way for having characters behave in dumb ways, holding on to information that would clear things up in an instant, even arguably lying to the viewers about a few things. The narrative becomes increasingly incoherent as it goes on, and The Missing doesn’t really make an effort to ensure that our sympathies are with the protagonist—it blithely assumes that any victim of domestic abuse is virtuous, and sort of… stops there. Adding a white policewoman to the plot feels like an imposition half-heartedly obeyed, while everything else also feels undercooked. The Missing is crazy, but not in the good ways—it’s not overblown, or daring in its ineptitude: it just seems like it’s going for the lower-possible effort, even when it forgets about important bits of the plot along the way.