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When The Missing came out in 2003, it was met with very little fanfare. The western starring Tommy Lee Jones, Cate Blanchett, and Evan Rachel Wood featured numerous strong performances, especially from Blanchett. The Missing tells the story of a woman in New Mexico Territory during the mid-1880s. Based on the novel The Last Ride by Thomas Eidson, The Missing explores multi-generational relationships and ongoing tensions between frontier settlers and Native Americans.

Blanchett is at the center of the action, drama, and thrills throughout The Missing. Director Ron Howard expertly used Blanchett's range as an actress and her ability to bring out the strongest emotions in audiences. The Missing is not just underrated, it features Blanchett in one of the best performances of her career.

Cate Blanchett's Performance Heightens the Realism of Life on the Frontier

Ron Howard was praised for the accuracy of The Missing by members of the Apache Nation.

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Something's missing in "The Missing".

Director Ron Howard's follow-up to his Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind" after he parted ways with "The Alamo", this murky, thriller-tinged Western has the terrain down cold -- from the wide-open spaces to the rocky vistas -- but beneath all the requisite genre trappings there's a vast, empty gulch where the affecting dramatic element should have been found.

Based on the novel "The Last Ride" by Thomas Eidson and adapted by Ken Kaufman ("Space Cowboys"), this story of a frontier doctor who is reluctantly reunited with her estranged father after her teenage daughter is abducted by a treacherous Apache more than slightly recalls the 1956 John Ford classic "The Searchers", but the derivative aspect isn't the major culprit.

Even with the ever-reliable Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones on hand, the picture seldom feels like anything more than a ride through a Western town set -- it's all rickety facade and scaffolding.

Although Columbia Pictures' marketing has wisely been playing up the thriller element in its TV ads and Howard's name carries some well-deserved weight, "The Missing" still looks to be a tricky sell, especially if it can't bank on year-end critic kudos.

Set in the untamed American Southwest circa 1885, the film wastes no time in establishing its unsettling tone as local healer Maggie Gilkeson (Blanchett) extracts an old woman's rotting tooth.

Soon after, a grisly, long-haired stranger called Jones (Jones) rides into her family's homestead seeking treatment. It turns out the visitor is none other than Maggie's father, who had abandoned her and her mother 20 years earlier to go and live among the Apaches.

The resentful Maggie wants to see neither hide nor ponytailed hair of him, but the two must become allies when her daughter Lilly Evan Rachel Wood) is kidnapped by the psychotic Pesh-Chidin (Eric Schweig), a spell-casting brujo, or male witch, who snatches teenage girls and sells them into Mexican slavery.

Of course, the ensuing trek to rescue Lilly -- in which they're accompanied by her younger sister, Dot (Jenna Boyd) -- is really about things like tolerance and reconciliation, and not just between father and daughter.

Wanting to have its politically correct cake and eat it too, Kaufman's annoyingly black-and-white script, with its borderline cartoonish characterizations, seems to be saying all Indians aren't bad ... but some are really, really bad.

Handed those sorts of archetypes, Blanchett and particularly Jones do what layering they can, but their characters haven't been given enough complexity to keep the viewer involved. With even less to work with, the supporting cast (which also includes Val Kilmer in a cameo as an Army lieutenant) are saddled with whatever version of good or evil they've been assigned.

Having always wanted to do a Western, Howard makes sure to get everything in, right down to the flaming arrows. And while he and cinematographer Salvatore Totino take full advantage of their New Mexico locations, very little of it carries any emotional weight despite the constant tug of composer James Horner's "Titanic"-sized score.

In the end, while Blanchett's Maggie comes back with what she was looking for, as well as something that she didn't know she had lost, the film emerges disappointingly empty-handed.

The Missing

Columbia Pictures

Revolution Studios and Imagine Entertainment present a Brian Grazer production in association with Daniel Ostroff Prods. A Ron Howard film

Credits:

Director: Ron Howard

Screenwriter: Ken Kaufman

Based on the novel "The Last Ride" by: Thomas Eidson

Producers: Brian Grazer, Daniel Ostroff, Ron Howard

Executive producers: Todd Hallowell, Steve Crystal

Director of photography: Salvatore Totino

Art director: Guy Barnes

Editors: Dan Hanley, Mike Hill

Costume designer: Julie Weiss

Music: James Horner

Cast:

Samuel Jones: Tommy Lee Jones

Maggie Gilkeson: Cate Blanchett

Lilly: Evan Rachel Wood

Dot: Jenna Boyd

Pesh-Chidin: Eric Schweig

Brake Baldwin: Aaron Eckhart

Kayitah: Jay Tavare

Honesco: Simon Baker

Emiliano: Sergio Calderon

Lt. Jim Ducharme: Val Kilmer

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time -- 130 minutes...