‘Abandon’ hope, all ye who see this film
Rule #1 for filmmakers: Avoid titles that cry out for obvious, negative review headlines. Only a great movie would escape the Hell’s Gate “Abandon” reference, especially with a Dante motif on display throughout the film.
“Abandon” is not a great movie.
It is a movie that spends a long time deciding what kind of movie it is. It turns out to be a psychological thriller. No, wait. A mystery. Or maybe suspense. Well, there is very deliberate, misleading, almost horror-like tension. Not to mention a fair amount of pretension. If there is such a thing as post-tension, this film might have that, too.
Katie Holmes (still shaking her “Dawson’s Creek” past) plays Katie Burke, a super-smart senior working on her thesis at some fancy Ivy-League-ish school. In fact, all the students at this school are super-smart, in standard, contrived, filmmakers-pretending-to-know-what-Ivy-League-schools-are-like ways. Most filmmakers probably went to college. Why can’t any of them present it believably?
Anyway, Katie’s boyfriend, Embry Langan (Charlie Hunnam, of the British version of “Queer as Folk”) is missing. Actually, he’s been missing for two years. But, since he’s such an enigmatic, brilliant, creative and preposterously arrogant rich orphan, the police have only just decided to look for him (given Hunnam’s annoying imitation of Brad Pitt playing Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison, one can hardly blame them).
Reformed substance abuser Detective Wade Hunter (Benjamin Bratt, “Law and Order”) is on the case, wandering around the campus with nary a sign of campus security asking for identification. He interviews Katie and other acquaintances of the missing snotty egotist, trying to determine if he is, in fact, dead. When Katie starts to see her ex around town, the mystery is solved … or is it?
Lots of psychological tidbits make us wonder if there is more — or less — going on than we are shown. By the time we begin to wonder what the title of the film means, we are told that Katie’s father abandoned her when she was a child. Ignore the movie — think for two minutes and the title and the rest of the plot are clarified.
Aside from Bratt’s sympathetic detective, who becomes another victim of Hollywood’s obsession with unlikely romance, it is tough to like any of the characters. Even Katie’s sad, “tree-hugger,” would-be boyfriend, Harrison (Gabriel Mann, “High Art”), is such a pale stereotype that we only briefly manage to care about him.
Holmes works well as an archetype of the screwed-up girl for whom every man falls, but this is only in retrospect. She spends most of the film as an obsessive student with little but academics in her life, and her character is suitably uninteresting.
After early concerns about questionable acting, it becomes evident that first-time director Stephen Gaghan and his surprisingly lousy script are to blame for the film’s mediocrity. Gaghan’s writing credits range from “Traffic” to “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.” “Abandon” ends up much closer to the latter.
The cinematography and film effects show that Gaghan is familiar with those aspects of filmmaking. The needlessly jumpy editing, and the overuse of standard Hollywood slow-motion, vomit-inducing flashbacks and cheesy PG-13 love scenes, however, demonstrate that he does not yet know how to make a good film.
Grade: C/D
