Last night's Lifetime movie was "My Husband Is Missing," a surprisingly good neo-noir thriller even though it had an awful lot of the clichés typical of this network. The story begins, as so many Lifetime stories do, with a typical bucolic day in the life of a suburban family; Anne Bradshaw (Daphne Zuniga, whose best-known previous credit was in Mel Brooks' "Spaceballs") is sending her husband Dale (Robert Underwood) to work. She solemnly reminds him that he's supposed to pick their teenage daughter Casey (Nicole Muñoz — and kudos to the film's casting directors, Dean E. Fronk, Donald Paul Pemrick and Edward D. Rea, for finding a girl who looks enough like Daphne Zuniga they're believable as mother and daughter) up from school that night since she'll be working too late on her own job to do so herself. Then we see a mysterious black van with an unseen driver following Dale on his way to work, blocking his way and forcibly taking him out of his own car. Anne doesn't know anything untoward has happened to her husband until that night, when Casey calls to tell her she's been waiting for an hour for dad to pick her up and he hasn't shown. Anne calls Dale's company — he owns his own business with a partner named Mel Davidson (David Lewis) and it's not quite clear what business they're in; at one point we're told it's a software company but later we see a warehouse full of hard goods — and it turns out Dale hasn't shown up for work either. Then Anne gets a video purporting to show Dale in the hands of a gravelly-voiced kidnapper — obviously he's running his voice through a filter so it can't be recognized — and she calls the police.
The police arrive in the person of a sheriff's deputy (the setting is an unincorporated town in Washington state — a common location for Lifetime movies since it's just south of British Columbia, Canada, and so the one can easily "play" the other) named Barry Matthews (Aaron Pearl), and there's an understated but powerful sexual attraction between him and Anne that becomes important later on in the plot. Only another law enforcer shows up, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs agent Sarah Pullman (played by Johannah Newmarch with a perfect I-don't-give-a-hoot-about-people-skills attitude that's by far the best piece of acting in the film), and she and Matthews end up in an all-out jurisdictional war because she's been on the trail of Dale's and Mel's company for over a year as a front laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. She's convinced not only that both partners are in on it but Anne is too. Barry also has an associate on the case named Mike Ferrit (Christopher De-Schuster, a tall, gangly but really cute blond "twink" type), whom he busted for computer hacking and, like the folks on "CSI: Cyber," was able to avoid punishment by coming over to the other side and doing his hacking on behalf of law enforcement.
Though not exactly the freshest or most original movie ever made, "My Husband Is Missing" — actually filmed in 2015 under the odd working title "Abducted Love" (for once Lifetime's title department actually came up with a better title than the one it replaced!) — is coherent, makes sense and has a number of appealing characters we want to see prevail (though I was sorry to lose Mike well before the end), and the conflicts within the Bradshaw family, especially between mom and daughter, add credibility and nuance to the characterizations. There are also some artful touches in Jennifer Studer's script, particularly the home movie of the Bradshaws Anne and Casey re-view twice during the action — showing a banal but happy suburban existence that will be revealed by the end of the film as a lie — and the media feeding frenzy Casey ends up on the receiving end of after Mel leaks his video of Anne and Barry smooching to the local media. My Husband Is Missing is quality entertainment with something of a film noir feel, and it's definitely several cuts above the usual Lifetime fare!
