The premise of Gerard Butler’s latest action flick, Last Seen Alive is pretty interesting, compelling even: a couple stops at a random gas station to fill up the tank, wife walks inside the store to buy something and then gets kidnapped.
What makes stories like this entrancing is the element of randomness.
Movies with non-elaborate plots can work especially when the conflict happens at random and pushes the character(s) to make certain decisions. The suspense then stems from the impact of the decisions made after that particular random occurrence.
Derrick Borte’s 2020 road rage film Unhinged is one good example: A young woman flips off at some random guy on the road, the guy turns out to have anger problems, which then sets off a series of really scary events.
This movie from director Brian Goodman is not. I can’t even consider this as a suspense-thriller because of the lack of moments that would rattle your consciousness as a viewer.
Now streaming on Netflix, Last Seen Alive was a wasted potential. And the problem probably started with its awful script, which then snowballed into poor direction. There were a lot of questionable moments and missed opportunities to introduce twists and turns that could have been riveting for the audience.
No spoilers here (but that won’t matter anyway if you’re not going to watch it anymore, right?) but majority of the decisions Will Spann (Gerard Butler) makes to find his wife Lisa (Jaimie Alexander) doesn’t make sense for his character. While some can be justified by the flashbacks (which are way too many, they don’t serve the movie anymore), the others will leave you incredulous.
The (lack of) stunts hasn’t helped either. And whatever little amount we had, was uninteresting. There was an explosion scene towards the end looked so ridiculous.
While the random element of kidnapping was okay, I feel that the script hurt the movie even more by hinting at us that the kidnapping wasn’t exactly random. There were breadcrumbs thrown our way which would make one think that perhaps there’s something more in the kidnapping. But then again, the trail leads nowhere.
This could have been a great Liam Neeson film.
Last Seen Alive is now streaming on Netflix.
