The Vanishing

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Year:	1993
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	George Sluizer
Genre:	Generic thriller
Starring:	Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland, Nancy Travis, Sandra Bullock
Rating:	2/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108473/
Tagline:	Obsession is the Ultimate Weapon
Favourite line:	None worth mentioning

Hollywood thriller starring The Dude and Jack Bauer.

The plot:
Barney Cousins (Jeff Bridges) is a family man. With a wife who loves him – but suspects he is having an affair – and a daughter who worships him, and who understands his need to get away from The Mrs. See, Barney spends a lot of time at his cabin, a retreat, for some solitude and much needed alone time.
Oh, and he’s also a killer.
Jeff Harriman (Kiefer Sutherland) is a lucky man. Madly in love with girlfriend Diane Shaver (Sandra’s Bullocks), they are on holiday together when first we meet them. Arguing a little, they pull in at a petrol station and, to broker peace, Diane offers to take over the driving so Jeff can relax with a beer. He gratefully accepts, so off she trots to the Mini-Mart to purchase something cold.
Trouble is, she never returns.
Now Jeff is a man on a mission: to find out precisely what happened to Diane the day she Vanished.

Based on a Dutch-French original, Spoorloos (a film I am yet to see), also directed by Sluizer and rated as one of the most terrifying movies of all time by Mark ‘Mr Horror’ Kermode, this is wildly generic stuff.
With a strong cast – Bridges, Sutherland and Bullocks are all eminently watchable – and a reasonably good premise, the film is undermined somewhat by moments of implausibility and, worst still, massively misfiring and misplaced elements of humour.
Take Bridges’ character as an example. Supposedly the main villain of the piece, he is introduced as a bumbling buffoon, instantly negating any sense of true menace from him. His plan, also, to capture women, seems ill-advised and rather feeble, again robbing him of any credibility.
Sutherland is probably given the most to do, here, and handles himself well enough, coming across every bit the desperate, frightened partner of an abductee. Trouble is, he meets and falls in love with another woman and it is here that the movie falls apart. Starting off as ‘the nicest woman on Earth’ she quickly transforms into something more unpleasant and unreasonable, chastising him for having thoughts about the woman that he lost.
Look, I know when you are with someone you want them to be devoted but, for fuck’s sake, his girlfriend disappeared without trace.
Give the guy a break!
Building to a climax so predictable and, got to say it, so Hollywood, anything that went before almost doesn’t matter, the abiding memory is one of familiar, well-trodden ground being churned up once more, the Hollywood Movie-Spurting Machine (HMSM) not really getting out of first gear here.
Oh, and the very last scene is one of the worst I’ve seen in a while, reminiscent of one of those ‘everyone starts laughing’ endings from He-Man or Thundercats.
Only just better than dreadful, this.