One and a half stars out of five

The weeks of late September and early October are very awkward for the movie industry.

With the summer’s tits and explosion heyday long past, and a solid month to wait before it’s open season for Oscar contenders, moviegoers can only hope for muddled winter release rejects. In that time-honored tradition comes ‘The Forgotten.’ This hackneyed mish-mosh ham-handedly plows through the genres of psychological thriller, Lifetime network-style schlock and extraterrestrial horror-and does justice to none of them.

Julianne Moore (from a million movies that are better than this, including ‘Evolution’ but not including ‘Jurassic Park: The Lost World’) gives a convincing, if somewhat cookie-cutter, performance as a woman gone ‘mad.’ She remembers her dead son, while everyone else on earth tells her that she never had a son. She is, by proxy, crazy.

On the search for what she ‘knows’ is true, Moore finds another parent who lost his child in the same accident. They begin the process of piecing together a conspiracy that by the final credits is as enormous as it is ridiculous.

The meat of the film focuses on this dynamic duo dashing from destination to destination, avoiding federal agents. Although these agents could be interchanged with any other branch of the Pentagon, they are representatives of the National Security Agency, which has a rich cinematic history (with apologies to ‘XXX’) of being the dirtiest group to garner a government paycheck ever.

Long story short, ‘The Forgotten’ is just one big sleepwalk of a movie. Moore is decent, but not spectacular. Anthony Edwards is effective in making you believe he is a main character before dropping off the face of the planet, and the normally bankable Gary Sinise is given an insanely small amount of screen time and no actual character resolution. One can only assume that his nebbish Brooklyn psychologist character with shadowy ties to ‘the conspiracy’ renounces his ways once we abruptly leave him before the climax to become a crime scene investigator.

Speaking of resolution, if you are a fan of that whole concept, then steer clear of ‘The Forgotten.’ It begins with questions, adds more, and then, just when you think you are in some line for answers, they slam you with more questions. For the record: when you don’t resolve your problems by the end of the movie, you are not making a mysterious thriller, you are launching a ship without a rudder-and barely any Gary Sinise.

Published on September 23, 2004 at 12:00 pm