Well that was a hot mess.
Paul (Thomas Jane) and Wendy (Anne Heche) take their ten year old daughter Taylor on a camping trip over the Thanksgiving weekend, But Taylor doesn’t make it to the holiday. She disappears on the very first day, while mom is away and dad is flirting with the hottie next door.
Over the next week, as the cops try and fail to find their daughter, Paul and Wendy unravel. Almost anyone would, in their shoes. It’s a terrible thing to lose your child, and to sit helplessly by while search and rescue continues to turn up nothing. But it’s also terrible to disregard official police “advice” and take things in hand themselves. People under incredible emotional duress don’t make the best decisions. Wendy and Paul make particularly bad decisions, but it turns out they’re not the most stable people.
Peter Facinelli writes, directs, and appears as one of the inept cops, and should be deeply ashamed of all three. This movie is so out of this world improbable that, at times, it feels like the writer meant it as a comedy but the director wildly misinterpreted everything, except that Facinelli is of course both the writer and the director and very very bad at both. The entire movie is built around a terrible twist ending that takes a page from the very worst of M. Night Shyamalan and actively seeks to one-up him in a competition of awfulness. Even Anne Heche and Thomas Jane, neither of whom was ever mistaken for a good actor, do their best worst acting in this.
My very best advice: try your damnedest to avoid this one on Netflix.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 
I won’t watch. I’m already pissed at the world.
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Wow. Will do.
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I started watching the movie, but gave up after Dad started “flirting with the hottie next door.” Why should I care about negligent parents?
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OK then. Pass. 🙂 … curious about the ‘twisty’ ending, I looked it up … probably would’ve been a clever movie in an alternate universe.
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I avoid missing kid movies, anyway.
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“My very best advice: try your damnedest to avoid this one on Netflix” – sold!
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Too late! lol I already saw this one and yeah, it was not all that good. I usually like Thomas Jane in just about anything but this was one where I did not.
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Worst damn movie I made myself sit through. Worst acting ever.
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I’m watching it now.Omg it is so bad. The acting is horrible. I needed to see if it was just me. But I’m in it now.
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I liked it. I watched a double-feature “missing daughter” movie afternoon, this one and “The Lost Girls”. Girls was a better movie but “The Vanished” was more entertaining. IRL the FBI would have wrested the case out of the local sheriff’s hands the minute the first body turned up. But if they FBI had shown up, the investigation would have been professional. The only way the movie was plausible in the least was in the context of a rural investigation with a well-meaning but fairly incompetent sheriff. And I quite enjoyed the ending.
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