Last Seen Alive

2022   Sky Cinema

Rated:  R

Length:  1 hr  35min

Action ~ Crime ~ Drama ~ Thriller

Directed by:  Brian Goodman

Starring:  Gerard Butler, Jaimie Alexander and Russell Hornsby.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret. I improvised the whole movie. I was only ever shown the first ten pages and even they were thrown away once we were on set.”

Gerard Butler stars as Will Spann who is driving his wife Lisa Spann (Jaimie Alexander) to her Mom and Dad’s house. They are going through a tough time in their marriage mainly due to Lisa’s recent one night affair with an old friend. She has decided that she needs a break and is going to stay with her folks for awhile. Just outside of the town where her folks live, they stop for gas. Lisa goes into the store and Will never sees her come out. Frantic, he searches the store, the restrooms, the parking lot and surrounding areas to no avail. He then calls 911 to report her missing.

Will then goes to Lisa’s folks house and tells them what happened. Not finding her there and alarming her folks, he heads back to the gas station to meet Detective Paterson who is assigned to look into the case. What follows is Will taking the law into his own hands and tracking down any clues as to what happened to Lisa. It leads him to a meth lab outside of town and a lot of unsavory characters, like “Knuckles” the handyman doing work on Lisa’s parents house, and Oscar, the gas station attendant who is a meth addict.

As I watched this I thought, first off, Gerard Butler sure seems like he’s overacting. It just felt off, a little too intense right off the bat. It didn’t get any better when he went to Lisa’s parents house. The first scene with them in it felt really bad. That sure is some bad acting, I thought. It didn’t get any better throughout the movie, if anything it seemed to get worse. Even the interactions between Lisa and Will felt forced, didn’t feel real, no depth, just hollow words. Just a lot of overacting.

The story was sketchy at best. As it goes along you find out that “Knuckles” the handyman had overheard Lisa’s parents talking while he was working on their house. He knew Lisa was coming to stay and that Will was a successful Real Estate developer. He came up with the idea to kidnap Lisa and make Will pay a Handsome Ransom to get her back. We find out later in the movie that “Knuckles” just happened to be at the gas station, just happened to see Lisa and forces her into his car without anyone seeing??? And then takes her to the meth lab outside town, where the Meth Kingpin decides he’s not going to worry about Ransom, I guess he doesn’t really need the money, and decides to bury Lisa in the back yard????

I always think about the review I’m going to write while I watch the movie. Not real intently, just generally. As I watched this I was thinking, Not much to say about this one, might be a short review. Definitely not one of Gerard’s better movies. The next morning when I write the review I always do a little research. And that’s when I found some info that put the whole movie into perspective for me. Gerard Butler posted on his Instagram account about LAST SEEN ALIVE. I think that summed it up and I couldn’t have said it any better about this movie. Here’s my thinking:

It feels like there was no storyline and the acting is terrible, not cohesive on any level, just overacting like they really didn’t know the storyline.

Here’s the quote from Gerard Butler’s Instagram account posted October 5, 2022:

“I’ll let you in on a little secret. I took this movie on as a fun challenge/experiment. I improvised the whole movie. I was only ever shown the first ten pages and even they were thrown away once we were on set. We shot the movie in 8 days. I was drawn to the idea of how it would feel stepping into scene after scene having no idea what was gonna be thrown at me. I’ve never taken on anything like that and it was both challenging and exhilarating. You can’t help but be in the moment.”

So it was an experiment by Gerard and the director Brian Goodman.

A failed one in my opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a Gerard Butler fan, I like his movies….just not this one.

Don’t waste your time, there are way better Gerard Butler movies out there, HUNTER KILLER for example. Now that’s a good Gerard Butler movie!

Two thumbs down…..way down.