LMN
LMN begins its ‘Spring Breakdowns’ themed movies, apparently to coincide with the traditional ‘spring break’ week from school, but the only thing this has in common with that raucous time when college students descend on Florida is … Florida, where the movie was shot. Come to think of it, with the number of school age characters in the movie on vacation, maybe it does take place during spring break, but far removed from the beaches where all the action usually takes place.
Instead, The Little Boy Who Went Missing — and if you want to find more information about the movie on IMDb, good luck because it’s listed under its actual title The Boy by the Pool — is centered around elementary school principal, and now single mom, Nicole and her teenage son of indeterminate age, Casey, on a week-long getaway at a Floridian resort for some bonding time because the mostly out-of-the-picture dad just doesn’t have time for Casey now that’s moved on, though Nicole is always encouraging Casey to have a relationship with his father (Casey is a bit resentful because he wanted them to have joint custody so he could live with both of them but Casey is under the impression that mom didn’t want that). After checking in, Nicole tries to get Casey to join her at the pool, but he just wants to stay in the room … until he doesn’t and shows up at the pool but avoiding his mother. He’s not there but a minute before he hears a commotion between a child and a grown man who is much too old to be bullying a seven-year-old over the child’s ball that he could not get out of the pool. The man (okay, he’s supposed to be another teenager, I guess) refuses to hand it over, Casey inserts himself into the situation to help the child and when the bully makes a snide comment about Casey’s father (not that he knows Casey’s father), Casey responds with a fist to the bully’s face. And an immediate order for them to vacate the premises. Nicole is not happy because they were there less than a day and the cost of the stay is non-refundable. The two are approached by a couple with a child, and they explain to Nicole that Casey was protecting their son. The man, Tom, who gives off creepy cult leader vibes, calls for the manager and insists that he allow Nicole and Casey to stay or he’s going to blackmail the resort by posting negative reviews to his two million followers on social media (he’s allegedly some kind of fitness guru). The manager has no choice but to let them stay, but Tom should have thrown in another caveat — they stay and the bully and his family are expelled. It’s only right since that guy started it but, alas, that does not seem to happen.
LMN
But Nicole, Tom and his wife Lori become fast friends, Lori finds vacations so lonely so she’s thrilled to have another adult to talk to, but Nicole begins to notice some really strange behavior in how overly protective they are of their son, Jacob. At the pool, the resort has a photo op for all the kids with the resort mascot but Tom and Lori refuse to let Jacob be in the picture, Lori explaining that Jacob is ‘photo-sensitive’. The manager says they can turn off the flash … um, they are standing in the blazing sun. I don’t think a flash is necessary or would make a difference. Then when Nicole is having a cocktail by the pool with Lori, Tom suddenly loses his mind when Jacob starts to go into the pool, dragging him away. Lori explains he’s allergic to the chlorine, but Nicole isn’t buying it anymore and she pretends to have forgotten something in her room and excuses herself, grabbing her purse and following behind Tom and Jacob. For some reason the father and son go into some service hallway, and Nicole follows, losing her purse somewhere along the way, and she notices Tom doing something with Jacob’s face. As they walk away, she sneaks further down the hall and looks in the trash can and spots a box for colored contact lenses. Was Tom putting a blue lens in the boy’s eye? That would make sense as to why he couldn’t get in the pool. But she makes a little too much noise and draws Tom’s attention so instead of running around the corner to get away, she hides in a closet where it takes Tom about two seconds to find her. Nicole popping out like she somehow made a wrong turn, trying to not act suspicious, is entirely suspicious but Tom plays it off. Tom isn’t stupid and he tells Lori back at their room that Nicole may be on to them. Lori wants to pack up and leave, but Tom feels that will only bring more heat down on them so he wants to stay and pretend everything is fine. Nicole decides to do a search for missing boys in the area, and she finds a Missing Child announcement with a picture that looks almost exactly like Jacob. She shows the black-and-white photo to Casey, and he says that can’t possibly be the same boy because Jacob has blue eyes. Again, it was a black-and-white photo, and did Casey really spend enough time with Jacob to know his eyes are blue?!? Nicole is certain they are one and the same and she looks up some videos on the YTB website (www.ytube.con) — hmmm, I wonder what that could be — and does more digging on the booking.com website that looks exactly like Facebook to the point of copyright infringement. She sees videos from the missing boy’s father, Rex, talking about how his wife died tragically, and then his son was taken, tugging at her heartstrings.
Luckily, Nicole’s old college friend/one-time boyfriend/possible romantic interest, Henry, is a cop in the area and she brings him all of this information. He’s reluctant to do anything based on her gut feeling, but when she tells him she already contacted Rex — which Casey saw on her laptop and totally flipped out about because he doesn’t believe the two boys are one and the same, driving a larger wedge between them — and that he’ll be there in a couple of hours, Henry has no choice but to have a conversation with the man. They concoct a plan for Nicole to get Tom, Lori and Jacob to a public area where Henry and Rex can get a look at the boy. They’re a little too far away so Henry texts Nicole to move closer — she has to make up an excuse to Lori that the housekeeper couldn’t fine her key — and Rex immediately recognizes his son, Ben, and he tries to run to him but Henry knocks him on his ass, telling the distraught father that they are going to do this the right way. Nicole asks Jacob if he’s done with his drink and she takes it to the trash can, removing the straw and sealing it in a baggie for Henry to use as a DNA sample. What Nicole doesn’t know is that Lori is ever vigilant and knows what she did with the straw, so she is more insistent with Tom that they have to flee. Instead, he and Lori make threats to Nicole, at gunpoint, forcing her to leave or else they’ll send a recording of her admitting to Tom that after her marriage broke up, she was interested in a teacher at her school and they … kissed, once, before she called it off. (By the way, Tom was not very subtle in how he placed his phone on the bar when attending to Nicole’s ankle injury as a result of their salsa moves, and how he got such a clean recording of her voice is remarkable.) So rather than being blackmailed, and fearful that Casey will find out (oh, but there is more to that story than he knows), she packs up and tells Casey they are going to a beach house for the rest of the week for some peace and quiet and bonding time. She also insists to Henry that she was absolutely, completely, irrefutably wrong about Jacob and that he should drop the case, with apologies to Rex for dragging him there under false pretenses. She leaves but neither of them believe her, and Henry calls to have the DNA test accelerated so he can have the results on his desk that day. Nicole and Casey get to their new hideaway, and she finally admits to him about her brief fling with the teacher … and that his father had an affair before any of that, and it was he who didn’t want joint custody. All this time she’s been playing the bad guy for Casey’s benefit, but he really should have figured things out when his dad was always absent and making excuses not to see him (he’s got a new girlfriend and is living with her so his teenage son would just be in the way). Henry gets the DNA results back and they are a match, confirming he is indeed Ben, and they head to the hotel to arrest Tom and Lori. When they arrive, they ask the manager what room they are in, and he tells them a room on the second floor, and makes an attempt to call them to see if they are in the room. Henry makes him hang up immediately, but the phone already rang in the room, and when there was no one on the other end, Tom took that as a signal to run. When Henry and the cops get to the ninth floor (the room number does not match the number the manager gave them), the room is empty but there is a steaming hot cup of coffee on the desk in the room. Rex ain’t happy that they let his son get away, but Henry assures him that they are not dropping the case. Nicole then gets a surprise at the beach house when she finds Tom and Lori there (for some reason they tucked Jacob into bed as if this was their rental), and they finally reveal the truth about Jacob … and Rex and Lori’s connection to them … putting Nicole in a quandary because everything that she has assumed to this point isn’t entirely as it seemed. Will Henry get to Nicole in time to save her (and she’s easy to find because she keeps posting her location on social media, so take that as a warning!)? Will the truth about Rex, Tom and Lori be revealed? Will Casey finally believe his mother? Who will live and who will die? And what will happen to Jacob/Ben in the end?
LMN
The Little Boy Who Went Missing has a lot going on, and the twists in the story by Leo McGuigan (writer of the excellent Taste of His Own Poison and the goofy Let’s Murder Like It’s 1999!) really keep things interesting. The problem is the execution of the production, from the continuity errors to some of the performances. Director Damián Romay does a good job at making the movie look professionally made, lighting is good, sets aren’t made out of cardboard, locations are used well … it’s just those little inconsistencies, that were perhaps in the script, perhaps a result of a tight shooting schedule, that make the whole thing feel a bit less-than-professional. I always have to call into question the director’s input on the actors’ performances. Here, everyone mostly does good work, although we do run into that typical issue of some actors making their characters too obviously shady. The biggest issue with the film is the climax, where Casey wakes up Jacob and takes him to the balcony for safety, and then he has to yell at people running by down below but no one can hear him. He’s like one floor up. Then he leaves Jacob on the balcony alone and tells him not to move until a nice policeman comes to get him. The police don’t know he’s there, and they’re all running across the lawn to get to Nicole, Tom, Lori and Rex before someone ends up dead. It was a very weird scene.
Laurie Fortier gives a pretty good performance as Nicole (although I kept seeing Katie Couric every time she was on screen). She is a woman who is carrying a lot on her shoulders, and she apparently has no outlet to relieve herself of those burdens. She takes on the bad guy role to protect her son, she uses her skills as a principal to see that something is not write with Jacob, she wants to do the right thing for everyone and then when it all blows up in her face, she isn’t sure what to do anymore. I don’t know if any person in her circumstance would overstep their bounds as much as she did, like contacting Rex before the police, but it works for dramatic purposes. Luke Omalza does what he can with the role of Casey. He’s either got to be the sullen teen or the angry teen, both emotions aimed at his mother who keeps treating him as if he was the seven-year-old. Quinn Bozza plays Tom like the aforementioned cult leader. He’s always talking in a hushed, slow manner, like he’s trying to hypnotize everyone — maybe he is — but he’s the opposite of the fitness guru influencers who usually come off as very high energy to get their followers PUMPED! Everything about Tom is suspicious, but even more shady is Marila Lombrozo as Lori. She seems to have no idea how to respond to any of Nicole’s questions without obviously and awkwardly deflecting to another topic, and none of her explanations about Jacob are convincing. Yet, there was still something I liked about Lombrozo and when the truth is revealed we realize that she’s carrying just as much weight on her shoulders as Nicole … although she certainly did not deal with the situation in the proper manner considering what her true profession was before she and Tom took Ben.
LMN
Britton Webb is also saddled with the typical cop character who always thinks people are over-reacting to situations. Even though he’s friends with Nicole … and it’s hard to tell if there is a romantic spark between them … he still treats her like she’s just a hysterical woman when she comes to him with her research about Jacob. Even when he’s got the DNA, he’s in no rush to get the results — and you’d think that would be a top priority considering the people in question are on vacation and could leave at any minute — until he picks up on Nicole’s odd ‘I’m out of here’ behavior. Jace Greenwood — who isn’t even credited at the end of the movie! — does a nice job of making Rex’s plight believable, able to turn on tears at the snap of a finger. When he first sees his son, his reaction is completely authentic, and he really makes the audience sympathize with him. But he has his own secrets, and Greenwood does a really good job of never revealing them. Smith Gilbert is a fine child actor, making Jacob seem like a total innocent, but I’m not sure how long he’s been with Tom and Lori for him to have completely accepted them as his parents. Matt Campanella has taken the best bullying performances of Thomas F. Wilson as Biff in Back to the Future and Mark Holton as Francis in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, making his unnamed and uncredited Older Bully character a guy who really deserves a punch in the face. Terry Farley as Brad, the hotel manager, does a nice job of clutching his pearls when faced with a bad review from Tom, but his actions of trying to call the room when the police arrive suddenly makes us wonder — is he in on this with Tom and Lori? He’s not, but it’s all filmed and acted in such a way that it becomes a question. (Of course, Brad should have figured the cops wanted an element of surprise, but the story needed the convenient plot device to get everyone out of the hotel and to the beach house for the climax.)
Overall, The Little Boy Who Went Missing is just okay. The story itself is actually interesting, especially in the way that it peels back the layers of the mystery like an onion, revealing startling truths about the main players. We just have to forgive some of the continuity issues (like Tom and Lori putting Jacob to bed at the beach house because it’s late, while it looks like 2:00 in the afternoon judging by the light streaming through the windows) and the ‘yes, I’m hiding something’ performances. In the end, it still manages to have some surprises among the unintentional humor.
The Little Boy Who Went Missing has a run time of 1 hour 30 minutes, and is rated TV-14.