by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent most of last night watching two Lifetime movies,
getting my weekly “fix” of them — it seems that Lifetime has moved the
“premiere” showings from Saturday to Sunday, which is going to be a problem
once the new TV season starts if they conflict with other things I want to
watch on Sunday nights, like the excellent CBS-TV series Madam Secretary and Elementary — last Saturday’s Lifetime movies were just reruns of things I’d
already seen but last night they presented two that were new for me. First up
was My Daughter Is Missing, which
seems to have originated with writer Jenny Paul thinking about redoing the
movie Taken (starring Liam Neeson
as a father who’s frantically searching for his daughter, who’s been kidnapped
by human traffickers) with a woman in the Neeson role. My Daughter Is
Missing turned out to be an excellent
thriller, unoriginal but exciting and well staged by director Tamar Halpern,
who showed a real flair for neo-noir
in color. It’s also interesting in that it’s not only set in Belgrade but was
actually shot there, though one wonders how the producers (no fewer than four
production companies are credited: MarVista Entertainment, Headlong
Entertainment, Red Production and Benattar Thomas Productions) got the
government of Serbia to let them film there when Paul’s script describes their
country as a hotbed of human trafficking and official corruption. The plot
centers around Sara (Miranda Raison), a middle-aged woman who was formerly a
computer hacker — it’s what brought her and her husband together in the first
place — only he got greedy and started using his hacking skills to steal from
banks and people’s accounts. He got caught and the couple lost everything — they had to give up their house and everything
else they owned to make restitution for the money he’d stolen — and ultimately
they broke up and Sara was left to raise her daughter Karissa (Sophie
Robertson) as a single parent.
Sara, like a lot of real-life ex-hackers, found
a legitimate way to make a living from her skills by becoming a computer
security consultant for major corporations, and in that capacity she’s invited
to give a speech at a computer security conference in Belgrade, which by
coincidence is also where her daughter Karissa has gone to be an exchange student.
Karissa is rooming with a Serbian girl named Lara (Jovana Stojilikovic), and
after Sara gives her speech Karissa and Lara decide to go out clubbing to a
spot called The Haven. What they don’t know is that what The Haven is a haven
for is human traffickers — the owner is part of an elaborate ring working
throughout Europe to kidnap young women and sell them on the “dark Web” as sex
slaves to rich men — and while Karissa and Lara are having a thrilling night on
the Belgrade club scene and being cruised by Dragan (Miodrag Radonjic), who
unbeknownst to them is the traffickers’ recruiter, Sara is on a date of her own
with Belgrade police captain Kozarski, the first man she’s been attracted to
since she and her husband broke up. Dragan drugs Karissa’s and Lara’s drinks
and Karissa, realizing what’s happened, attempts to call her mom but passes out
before she can say much, and Dragan seizes her phone and steps on it. The two
girls are taken by the sex ring and handed over to Mira (Milena Cucilovic), a
red-headed woman overseer who in a lot of ways is the most interesting
character in the piece, a grimly determined hatchet-faced woman whom I presume,
based on how real-life traffickers operate, was once a trafficking victim
herself and rose through the ranks from prostitute to madam. The scenes in
which Mira, assigned to take pictures of the “merchandise” for their dark-Web
site, vainly tries to get Karissa to smile so she’ll look more attractive to
potential buyers are grimly amusing. At one point Karissa and Lara attempt to
escape, but Lara is shot in the back and Karissa is recaptured — they’re less
interested in Lara because Serbian girls are a dime a dozen, but an American will fetch a good deal more on the traffickers’
slave market — the traffickers leave Lara for dead on the street but she’s
found alive and taken to a hospital.
Sara risks her life sneaking into the back
room of The Haven and downloading the security footage that shows exactly how
her daughter and Lara were kidnapped — there’s a The Firm-style suspense sequence in which we wonder whether
Sara will be able to finish downloading the files to her flash drive before
she’s caught and thrown out, beaten or worse — only Sara makes the mistake of
giving the flash drive to her cop friend Kozarski. Kozarski is so uninterested
in investigating the case that we realize well before Sara does that he’s
corrupt and in league with the traffickers. Fortunately there is an honest cop on the Belgrade force, Alek (Emmett J.
Scanlan), though for a few acts both we and Sara are kept in some uncertainty
as to which of the cops is honest
and which is corrupt, and it’s not clear whether Alek is a local officer or an
agent of Interpol, which is after the trafficking ring because it operates
throughout Europe. Jenny Paul’s script tracks so closely to the Taken model that the final “auction” of Karissa takes
place on a boat, and against impossible odds Sara and Alek manage to take out
the kidnappers and get Karissa back — while the fellow computer geeks at the
conference Sara was in Belgrade to speak at (ya remember the conference?) helped her trace the location of the “auction” and
downloaded enough information from the ring’s computers that Interpol will be
able to take it down. Despite its derivativeness, My Daughter Is
Missing is actually a quite good thriller;
director Halpern maintains the suspense and tension and moves the story along
fast enough we don’t have time to think about the plot improbabilities (like
why on earth the traffickers waited to kidnap Karissa and Lara until Karissa’s
mom was in town — one would think they could have grabbed her earlier and never
got caught). The piece is also quite well acted, with Sophie Robertson
especially convincing as the resourceful young woman who keeps her wits about
her in a terrible situation and remains focused on how she can get out of it.
Despite the rather clinical title (though the working title, Missing
in Europe, was even more blah), My
Daughter Is Missing is a quite impressive
piece of work that manages to do its job even if it does seem like you’ve seen it before.
