by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the
latest Lifetime “world premiere” movie, 16&Missing (the imdb.com page for it lists it more
typographically conventionally as 16 and Missing, but the actual title credit is as above, with an
ampersand and no spaces, as if it were a Twitter “handle” — and Lifetime’s
current penchant for putting hashtags in front of the titles of their movies
when they flash them on the screen in mid-film to let people who’ve been
channel-surfing know what they’re now watching makes the title look even more
“Twitteresque”: #16andMissing). It was one of Michael Feifer’s auteur productions: he produced, wrote and directed, and
his company is called “Feifer Worldwide,” and was a not-good, not-bad typical
Lifetime story about an overprotective mom, Julia (Ashley Scott), who’s worried
about her 16-year-old daughter Abbey (Lizze Broadway) — that’s how her first
name is spelled both on imdb.com and when we see her referred to by name in
texts flashed upon the screen. At the start of the movie Julia and Abbey’s
stepfather Daniel (David Starzyk) have just given her her own car for her 16th
birthday, but of course it comes with a warning that she’s to use it carefully
and safely. Of course, Abbey has no intention of following orders: for the past
two years she’s been carrying on an online correspondence with Gavin Brown
(Mark Hapka), who’s told her he’s a police officer in Prescott, Arizona, and
Abbey is determined to use her new car to drive out there and see her online
beloved for the first time. Of course, being a male lead in a Lifetime movie —
and a highly attractive man, at that (Feifer gives us some good crotch shots of
Hapka’s black jeans-clad midsection: he isn’t throwing that big a basket but it’s nice enough to be impressive
aesthetically) — we can guess that “Gavin” is up to no good, but it won’t be
until two-thirds of the way through the movie that we’ll find out what he’s
really doing and why he wants Abbey. One conceit of the film’s plot is that as
an active FBI agent Julia can tap into the expertises of just about anyone else
who is now or has ever been part of the FBI. “Now” includes an African-American
information technology specialist she regularly works with, who shows her how
to hack Abbey’s e-mail and smartphone so she can find out where her daughter is
and what he and “Gavin” have been saying to each other. He also runs down
Gavin’s record; he learns that “Gavin” is really an ex-convict but at first he
thinks Gavin is merely “trolling,” sending out hundreds of texts and e-mail
messages to social media sites aimed at women and hoping one “bites” and
corresponds with him, which will give him someone he can date (and fuck) once
he gets out.
It turns out “Gavin” has a far more sinister agenda than that, one
hinted at by a barely motivated (though we find out its importance later)
flashback in which Abbey as a child watches her dad, a fellow FBI agent, get
kidnapped and killed by his former partner, who’s “gone rogue” and hooked up
with a major drug kingpin who has a huge warehouse filled with neatly stacked
stashes of illegal narcotics. Abbey’s dad, of course, remains honest, but for
his pains he and his daughter are kidnapped by the rogue FBI agent, Walter
Sanford, who is later killed in the line of duty by Julia. Abbey saves her own
life only by following dad’s order to her to run into the surrounding forest
and hide. Two years later Julia married Daniel, something for which Abbey never
forgave her, especially since Daniel brought his own two bratty kids into the
relationship (it’s not clear whether either or both of them are Daniel’s and
Julia’s children or Daniel’s by a previous marriage, though the snotty young
boy who heard Abbey leave but didn’t say anything about it because “I’m glad
she’s gone” certainly looks too old to have been the offspring of Daniel and
Julia). When Abbey drives out into the desert to meet Gavin, he’s so young and
personable — Abbey says he looks older than he did in his profile picture
online but he’s told her he’s 23, and frankly that’s how old he looked to me
(though Mark Hapka’s biography on imdb.com gives his birthdate as May 29, 1982,
which would make him 33) — I
was wondering if the schtick was that he was trolling for potential victims for a human-trafficking
ring and the risk Abbey was in was that she’d be sold into sexual slavery as a
prostitute. Certainly such criminal enterprises, both in other movies and in
real life, rely largely on “hooking” their female (and male) victims with
young, personable, genuinely attractive partners who then turn them over to
their pimps for the brutal process they call “breaking” (in the old days of
actual chattel slavery in the U.S. the newly captured Blacks from Africa — the
ones who survived the Middle Passage — were subjected to a similar
will-breaking routine the people who did it called “seasoning”). But that
wasn’t where Michael Feifer was taking us; nor, as I also briefly thought, was
he going the route Robert Bloch, Joseph Stefano and Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho, creating a genuinely attractive but seemingly
milquetoast character who turns out to have some bit of psychological glare-ice
in his makeup that turns him into a crazy killer. Instead nice, young,
personable “Gavin” turns out to be Walter Sanford, Jr., son of the rogue FBI
agent who killed Abbey’s father in the flashback sequence and then was killed
by Abbey’s mother — and Sanford fils’ motivation is bitterness over having lost his dad and grown up in
foster homes, so he’s determined to make both Julia and Abbey suffer the way he
and his dad did, though he’s undecided which of his victims he wants to kill
first.
Thanks to another FBI agent, a retired one Julia used to work with
before he quit the Bureau and settled in Prescott, Julia is armed both with a
pistol and a high-powered rifle, and after she tries to explain to Sanford how
his dad’s death really went down (provoking another flashback, an ill-timed one
when we want the show to smash towards the end without the excitement, such as
it is, letting up), he tries to kill Abbey and Julia blows him away before he
can do that and before the local cops, which she and her retired-FBI friend
have called, can arrive at the scene. The End — except for the
everything’s-back-to-normal tag scene in which Julia and Abbey joke about how
long she’s going to be grounded for this (the rest of her life, Julia says) and
how long it’s going to be before Julia allows Abbey to date men (never, Julia
says, which of course led me to joke about Abbey becoming a Lesbian). I’ve no
doubt seen several of the Lifetime movies Michael Feifer has produced, directed
and written, but the one that sticks in my mind is His Secret Family, about a woman who discovers that her husband is a
bigamist and she was actually wife number two. His Secret Family struck me as considerably better than 16&Missing, mainly because it had a much more interesting
villain and also its considerably quirkier (and kinkier) plot line seemed to
turn Feifer on more than the standard “watch your children” moral tale of 16&Missing, which was decently acted (though Feifer’s casting
director slipped up badly by casting Abbey’s best friend Janelle with a young
actress, Stella Hudgins, who looked so much like Lizze Broadway that for a
while I was confused as to which of these lovely young teenage girls would be put in mortal peril) and
acceptably directed but offered nothing outside the common run of Lifetime
movies, either for good or ill.
