AMBER ALERT (2024)

Studio:   Lionsgate
Director: Kerry Bellessa
Writer:   Kerry Bellessa, Joshua Oram
Producer: Kerry Bellessa, Leal Naim, Tony Stopperan, Summer Bellessa, Joseph Restaino
Stars:    Hayden Panettiere, Tyler James Williams, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, Kurt Oberhaus, Katie McClellan, Kevin Dunn

Review Score:

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Summary:

A rideshare driver and his passenger chase after an abducted child when an Amber Alert identifies the kidnapper's car.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

When the rideshare she booked drives away because she was late, Jaq flags down a different rideshare driver, Shane, as he drops off his final fare. Despite insisting he is off duty, Shane ultimately agrees to drive Jaq to her destination due to her persuasive insistence. Jaq comes to feel bad when she finds out her ride is making Shane late for his son Jake's fifth birthday, which Shane's ex Shannon repeatedly calls to chastise him about. As they gradually become acquainted during the ride, Jaq later confides that she sympathizes with Shane's parental pains because she lost a son who was stillborn.

A man abducts seven-year-old Charlotte Bryce from a park while her mother Monica and grandmother Gail are distracted. Local 911 operator Cici takes Monica's frantic emergency call and subsequently recommends issuing an Amber Alert to Sgt. Phil Casey. Casey explains he cannot issue the alert because they don't have a license plate number. After Monica drives to the police station to plead her case in person, Casey relents and issues a vague Amber Alert for a black Toyota Camry.

After receiving the alert on their phones, Jaq spots a vehicle that matches the description. Jaq calls 911 and is connected to Cici, who takes down the license plate number and promptly ends the call due to the high volume of tips coming in.

When the Amber Alert appears on an electronic street sign, the car speeds off suspiciously. Jaq convinces Shane to follow it to a gas station.

When the driver goes inside the station, Jaq sneaks closer to the car. In the meantime, Cici receives a call that seems to positively identify the Amber Alert vehicle with a plate number that does not match this car. Jaq spots a little girl in the backseat just before the driver returns. Jaq drops an earbud through a cracked window and sneaks back to Shane.

Using the earbud to eavesdrop on the driver, Jaq and Shane hear him making a phone call. From the call, Jaq writes down the name Williams, a phone number, and another series of numbers.

As their pursuit of him continues, the man pulls over. Shane pulls over too. The man identifies himself as Aaron as he confronts Jaq and Shane about following him. Aaron says he knows they are following him because of the Amber Alert, but he claims he is merely taking his ill daughter Olympia, who supposedly suffers from arrhythmia, for treatment in Tennessee. With Jaq openly questioning his story, Aaron offers to introduce Jaq and Shane to the girl. Jaq immediately agrees, but stops short when a new Amber Alert is issued with the different plate number. Jaq apologizes to Aaron and returns to Shane's car.

Still suspicious of Aaron, Jaq calls Cici to ask if the man who phoned in the plate number was named Aaron, which Cici confirms. Jaq and Cici realize the abductor called in a fake plate number to misdirect police when he stopped at the gas station. Jaq tells Cici she saw the girl in the backseat wearing white shoes and pink socks, which confirms she is Charlotte.

Jaq and Shane catch up to Aaron's car. Jaq calls the phone number she wrote down earlier, which connects her to Aaron. Jaq bargains to stop pursuing Aaron if he just turns over Charlotte. Aaron threatens to throw the girl out of his speeding car instead. Jaq calls Aaron's bluff, but Aaron discards a doll that she and Shane think is real. Jaq and Shane realize they were decoyed when they stop. Aaron speeds away.

With Charlotte's mother Monica present, Casey and Cici have another phone call with Jaq and Shane. Everyone collectively discovers the other numbers Jaq wrote down earlier were a birthdate. The clues ultimately reveal Aaron's real name is Benjamin Williams, who actually has arrhythmia, and the call Jaq overheard was him phoning a pharmacy to fill a prescription.

Monica implores Casey to get Jaq and Shane to resume their pursuit of Benjamin. Casey explains he cannot involve civilians, but he offers to personally go to Benjamin's home address along with other officers.

Having snapped a photo of Jaq and Shane's phone numbers, Monica calls them herself. Jaq agrees to do whatever she can to find Charlotte. Monica passes along Benjamin's home address, which Jaq and Shane track to a secluded house on a remote road.

Shane calls Benjamin. Impersonating a pharmacist, Shane seemingly convinces Benjamin he needs to pick up his prescription before the pharmacy closes. When Benjamin exits, Jaq and Shane break into his house.

Jaq and Shane are disturbed to find macabre scrapbooks and other evidence indicating Benjamin has abused and murdered multiple kidnapped children. Shane recovers a handgun. In a hidden room, Jaq and Shane find Charlotte. They also find Jaq's earbud and a pharmacy bag, indicating Benjamin prepared for them to come to his house and only pretended to leave.

Shane and Benjamin get into a gunfight while Jaq hides with Charlotte. Benjamin gets past Shane to corner Jaq. Benjamin shoots two bullets into Jaq, but before he can fire a fatal final shot, Sgt. Casey arrives in time to gun down Benjamin.

As police process the crime scene, Charlotte reunites with Monica. Jaq smilingly observes their embrace from an ambulance with Shane at her side.

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Review:

2024's "Amber Alert" remakes a 2012 "found footage" film with the same title. The new version comes from the same director, Kerry Bellessa, who also reteams with cowriter Joshua Oram on an updated screenplay.

The original "Amber Alert" currently sits at a 4.4 user rating on IMDb. Over on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences only scored it with a 36% splat, and not enough critics logged reviews to qualify for a Tomatometer percentage. With numbers that low, it's safe to say the first film wasn't particularly well received.

I might be one of the few people who found merit in the movie, as I rated it 65/100, high enough to equate to a cautious recommendation. Over a decade later, that "Amber Alert" (review here) is far from fresh in my memory, though my review reminds me that in between sleepy spans of typical "found footage" fluff, the film also depicted "the too real terror of helplessness at the hands of a twisted stalker" to reflect "a grim depiction of frighteningly relatable horror."

Bellessa and Oram appear to have learned valuable lessons from their previous experience. Rather than deliver deja vu, the duo creatively carries over the atmospheric tension that worked best in 2012, cuts out some chaff, and paces the freshened plot for a thriller better suited to a mainstream presentation. This follow-up cracks its chassis on different bumps in the road, yet still drives down a suspenseful path that offers a smoother ride for newbies as well as anyone who wasn't impressed the first time around.

"Amber Alert" completely ditches the "found footage" frame. It doesn't even wink at its genesis by starting in first-person before having someone throw a camera away. The film does, however, start on a stereotypical drone shot running perfectly perpendicular to the car the camera follows, making for an auspicious opening that isn't particularly promising if you're hoping for something original.

That flat flavor changes quickly though. The next sequence follows an unseen driver passing by children playing in parks and walking on suburban sidewalks. Through moody cinematography that's subtly shadowed, "Amber Alert" quietly conveys an unsettling suggestion that sometimes abductions are so random, most people never know they were potential targets reflected in a car mirror, and perhaps a spontaneous distraction was the only thing keeping them from ending up imprisoned in a kidnapper's cellar. It's an eerie notion hauntingly captured on camera.

Holding on that idea of randomness, the setup then pulls a page from Alfred Hitchcock's playbook by positing that any average person can just as easily be unwittingly dropped into a position to become a potential hero. When Jaq's rideshare driver takes off after tiring of waiting for her, the woman flags down Shane, a different rideshare driver as he's dropping off his final fare. Shane is already late for his son's birthday party, but Jaq sweet talks her way into his car for an off-the-books ride. Away they go, one Everyman and one Everywoman who happened to be in the same place at the wrong time.

Across town, distracted mother Monica looks away for a moment. By the time she looks back, her seven-year-old daughter Charlotte has already entered a mystery man's car. Without a license plate number, police only have a color, make, and model to go on. An Amber Alert goes out anyway, beginning a series of unlikely events when Jaq and Shane spot a suspicious vehicle and decide to follow it on their own.

Once the story gets out of first gear, "Amber Alert" maintains a steady foot on the gas. Speaking of gas, one of the earliest nailbiters comes when the kidnapper stops at a fuel station, and Jaq dares to sneak forward for a closer look. It's a scene borrowed from the 2012 film, but there are successive "hold your breath" bits of Jaq avoiding detection, planting an earbud for eavesdropping, and trying to peer into the backseat before being spotted. "Amber Alert" finds even more ways to twist stomachs into knots with single shots, like a row of children's shoes lined up on the abductor's doorstep, which tells multiple horror stories without moving the camera or having anyone say anything at all.

In between uncomfortable interactions where Jaq and Shane confront the kidnapper, or play a game of calling each other's bluffs over the phone, "Amber Alert" intentionally eases mounting tension by checking in with the missing girl's mother. We see her phone blow up with texts from worried relatives. We watch her face form into a thousand-yard stare while authorities mumble in the background. It's only a hint of the horror a desperate parent experiences in this unimaginable scenario, but "Amber Alert" remembers to show this important side of the story so the movie isn't diminished into a feature-length car chase.

Even at 85 minutes, the runtime is still too long, a problem that also plagued its predecessor, which only ran 70 minutes yet struggled for material to stuff inside itself, too. Feeling the burn of having to fill inessential minutes, "Amber Alert" decides to force in some personal drama for Jaq and Shane to discuss during their drive. Conversations unrelated to the case are noticeably overwrought, although actors Hayden Panettiere and Tyler James Williams tap into enough of their talents to burn through middling material without inspiring too many eyerolls. Their chemistry isn't through the roof, but they possess the personality to make their characters more than mere conduits for facilitating the cat-and-mouse action.

"Amber Alert" was cruising toward a score in the green until a clunky climax fumbled the finale, then kept tumbling all over with additional dopey developments. During the denouement, the movie hits so many rote notes, I partly wonder if the filmmakers were coerced into veering off course to turn their project into something more familiar, and thus "safer," for those who feel more fantasy would balance out the realism. The final straw comes from a completely misguided ending that puts the "hero" crown on a person who definitely does not deserve the title. If Kerry Bellessa and Joshua Oram remake the movie again in another 12 years, this is the first thing they need to change.

It's not just the ending. The movie reaches the limits of reason and plausibility with several serendipitous plot points. Viewers who think those limits are broken are likely to laugh off the movie as a far-fetched bust while reaching for the remote. Thankfully, creepy content outweighs outrageous predictability so on the other side of the aisle, viewers who can look past how far the film bends believability should be intermittently captivated at a minimum, and possibly deeply disturbed if they're a parent who fears this fate for a child.

Review Score: 70

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