Abandon
Has Issues Abandon
Has IssuesAbandon is one of those movies where I was glad the seat next to me was empty. Slow and drawn-out, the film had me leaning my head to the right quite often and kind of half-resting it on the cushioned back of the next chair over. The movie has its moments. But it became very obvious to me about halfway through where the story was heading. Then, it just became tedious getting to the conclusion.
Katie Holmes of Dawson's Creek stars as Katie, a brilliant college senior on the verge of graduating to her dream job in the corporate world of Manhattan. One day while writing her thesis, she is summoned into the dean's office where she is introduced to Wade Handler (Benjamin Bratt), a down-and-out police detective who has been assigned to solve the two-year-old disappearance of her boyfriend, Embry (Charlie Hunnam). The memory of Embry has haunted Katie ever since he walked out on her for parts unknown. Is he dead? Did he run away to Europe? Or is he just a control freak who is still hanging around campus and threatening Katie's plans for the future.
Abandon is not a bad movie. Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Traffic, the movie is in spots a finely detailed and intermittently clever little thriller that has some real nice touches to it. I was impressed at Gaghan's ability to weave a tale for the big screen where even the peripheral characters had resonance. Generally in movies of this type, the people around the two main characters are just there to carry their bags from scene to scene or (worse) slasher fodder. But in this movie, we get quirky character turns from Zooey Deschanel as Katie's promiscuous roommate, Gabriel Mann as a sensitive undergraduate who wants only to love Katie, and Melanie Lynskey as Katie's zoned-out rival who pushes a creaky book cart in the library and seems to know little details about everyone around her.
Katie Holmes, though, really impresses in the lead. I have liked her choices in the past, ranging from Wonder Boys and Go to The Gift and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm. For once, the lead of a thriller targeted at teens is actually smart and sharp. She starts to become unglued when she begins seeing Embry everywhere on campus, forcing her to deal with abandonment issues not just when Embry left but also when her father left her when she was a little girl. Holmes does a good job depicting that intense time in a college student's life when the final weeks of senior year mean the difference between immediate success in the real world and the wasting of years of hard study and dedication.
The two lead males fare less well. I have no idea why guys like Bratt leave popular TV shows where they play cops, ostensibly to get meatier roles, and then they end up in movie roles playing ... cops! Jimmy Smits did it with Bless the Child." Ditto Andre Braugher when he left Homicide and one of the first roles he played was ... a homicide detective in Frequency. In Abandon, Bratt looks a little lost without Jerry Orbach to play off of, thus a certain level of boredom hangs over his muted investigation scenes. But we accept him in the role, because his Law & Order reruns still play every week on cable.
Newcomer Hunnam, meanwhile, is saddled with one of the most ridiculous movie haircuts in recent memory. He looks like the evil offspring of a most unholy coupling of Rod Stewart and Kato Kaelin. The guy is supposed to be a ruthless, brilliant cad, but the whole time we're thinking, "Dude, you look like a idiot." For a while, you don't know where the movie is really going with all these Embry sightings. Is it a stalker film? A ghost picture? A story about a loved one returning to show Katie who she really is? The film's pace is dragged down even further as Katie gets more and more exhausted. Each time she lays her head down on a desk or a bed or a sofa to rest, she starts to have nightmarish flashbacks and dreams of Embry in the past and the present. The flashbacks become tedious after a while, especially to someone like me who solved the movie's mystery about halfway through and was hoping Gaghan would pick up the pace.
Ah well. Like I said, Abandon is not without merit. It would make a really good video rental a few months down the line. But when you have a truly great motion picture that also aims to scare and surprise like The Ring also coming out this weekend, you tend to save your praise for that. Maybe it's the fact that I had just come off such a truly affecting and chillingly cunning film that has me down on Abandon. But there's no denying that Abandon is half the movie The Ring is. So maybe paying half admission price at a matinee will have you leaving the theater feeling more satisfied than I feel right now.
Abandon is rated PG-13 for drug and alcohol content, sexuality, some violence, and language.
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