Last Seen Alive (2022)

Last Seen Alive arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that has nothing on its mind beyond the mechanics of a man losing his wife at a gas station and then doing something about it. Gerard Butler plays Will Spann, a wealthy real estate agent, who watches his spouse vanish between the pump and the bottled water and promptly abandons every institutional remedy available to him. The police are notified. The police are ignored. What follows is a pursuit through surveillance footage, a forest, a meth lab, and one unfortunate handyman locked in a trunk. It is competent. It is also entirely weightless, which is its own kind of achievement.

For the purposes of this ledger, the film registers a clean and unbroken silence. The cast includes performers of color in supporting roles, and the screenplay never asks them to be anything other than cops and criminals. No romantic configuration steps outside convention. The marriage at the center is a traditional one, and the wife exists to be recovered, not understood. Race, class, climate, body image, neurodivergence, and the historical record are all left undisturbed. The protagonist is rich, and the film has no objection to this. Nobody pauses to explain how we ought to feel about any of it. The thriller simply thrills, or attempts to.

Critics were unmoved, noting the plot's resemblance to the 1997 Kurt Russell vehicle Breakdown, and Netflix audiences made it the most watched film in several countries regardless. This is the natural habitat of the unmarked entertainment object: too generic to offend, too efficient to bore, too incurious to say anything. We classify it accordingly. A sommelier presented with a glass of tap water can still note the mineral content, the temperature, and the absence of everything else. So it goes here. Zero across the board, and no hard feelings.

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