Plot: An American woman spends more than ten years tracking down her daughter who was abducted and taken to the Middle East by the child’s father.
Review: The power of rescuing children has fueled movies across genres, from the over-the-top action of Taken to the societal justice of Sound of Freedom. You know you want to catch the bastards who would take a helpless kid and bring them to justice, but watching that get played out as violent revenge is a guttural and satisfying movie experience. The intensity of a parent seeking their child cannot be understated, and the new film Stolen Girl aims to chronicle that emotional weight. Led by Kate Beckinsale as a mother committed to finding her daughter for over a decade, Stolen Girl has good intentions in the story it wants to tell, but it cannot help but get bogged down by the cliches of the action movie formula. Despite a solid middle and a surprising final act, Stolen Girl is too many genres blended for an unsatisfying film that does not feel like an action movie nor work like a straight drama.
Stolen Girl follows Mara (Kate Beckinsale), a mother living in rural Ohio with her daughter, Amina, and her infirmed father (Matt Craven). Sharing custody with her ex-husband, Karim (Arvin Kananian), Mara turns her back at the store one day and finds that four-year-old Amina is gone. The police quickly find Karim’s residence cleaned out and evidence that he returned to Syria with his daughter in tow. Mara is gutted but does whatever she can to protest in Washington D.C. to lobby for laws preventing parents from kidnapping their own children, to calling every hospital in the Middle East to find Karim. Over a decade, Mara fails to locate Amina and eventually is approached by Mitchell Robeson (Scott Eastwood). Robeson operates a private company that rescues children and offers Mara a job helping them in exchange for assisting in the search for Amina. Mara takes the job and learns about the various kidnappings around the world while never giving up the search for her daughter.
For the film’s first act, we see Kate Beckinsale spend her time handing out flyers, making phone calls, and crying as she tries to find her missing child before the tone shifts dramatically when Robeson enters the picture. Scott Eastwood, the spitting image of his father Clint, teaches Mara how to blend in on their missions as she dons wigs and costumes and learns to shoot guns alongside Robeson’s friend Carl (Jordan Duvigneau). As the trio traverse global locales ranging from Mexico, Lebanon, Beirut, and Albania, Stolen Girl showcases numerous fight scenes and escape sequences filmed in an extreme hand-held style that would make Paul Greengrass nauseous. The action is disjointed and repetitive, interspersed with Mara continuing her search for her daughter, which feels secondary to her new life as an action-hero level field operative, almost on par with any cinematic spies. At that point, the filmmakers decide to halt any momentum gained over the movie’s first hour and shift the structure of Stolen Girl into a wholly different film.
Kate Beckinsale has spent the last several years churning out multiple films that feel eerily similar to Stolen Girl, and I was almost going to lump this film in with the rest. While the marketing materials for Stolen Girl promote the gunplay and action, this is a very dialogue-heavy movie that examines the thousands upon thousands of kidnapped children who never find their way home. Unfortunately, this movie, which says it is based on a true story, turns an important topic into a by-the-numbers movie that incorporates conspiracy theories, government mistrust, and every trope you can imagine. Beckinsale gets to actually act in this film as opposed to focus on action work, but the movie is so reliant on action that when it shifts between drama and stunts, it feels disjointed at best. Eastwood does what he can in his scenes, but any time Robeson utters dialogue and you cannot see his face, the ADR work is shoddy and does not sound like Eastwood. By the time the movie wraps, the ending should have been a shocking moment that would make audiences sit up and pay attention, but it is subdued by the monotonous ninety minutes that preceded it.
Filmed almost entirely in Italy, Stolen Girl was written by Kas Graham (Last Passenger) and Rebecca Pollock (Woken). The film ends with text that claims the current whereabouts of Mara and Amina, but I do not get the feeling that these are two real people. Stolen Girl feels like an amalgam of dozens of stories that actually occurred, which have been mashed into a feature-length script that hits all of the requisite notes to stir controversy and inspire people to take action. The problem is that the rote dialogue feels stilted and artificial, which director James Kent cannot rescue. Kent, who directed Testament of Youth, tries to mask the Italian shooting locations as every country the characters visit, which all look vaguely Mediterranean. Stolen Girl does have a cinematic feel that helps elevate the otherwise lackluster production values, but it cannot take this movie to anything close to Taken or Sound of Freedom.
Stolen Girl is a prime example of a movie with a message that cannot communicate nuance or subtlety about what it is trying to raise awareness of. The massive amount of kidnappings and child trafficking rings in the world is disgusting and something that should be talked about at the highest levels of power. Still, Stolen Girl uses it for entertainment, which undermines the goal it set for itself. The middle act of the movie could have turned into a solid action movie, while the first and final acts feel like halves of very different dramas about the central theme. Each of the three sections of this movie could have worked on its own had the filmmakers picked a lane and stuck with it. As it is, Stolen Girl is a weakly scripted movie that does not know whether it wants to be inspirational or entertaining and fails to be either. Kate Beckinsale is still a very talented actress and deserves so much better than this. I feel bad talking badly about this film because the subject is so important, but Stolen Girl is not the right vehicle to convey this message to the masses.
Stolen Girl opens in theaters and on digital on September 26th.
Source:
JoBlo.com
