Stolen Girl Review: Kate Beckinsale’s Committed Performance Elevates James Kent’s Uneven Kidnapping Thriller

The idea of Kate Beckinsale playing a desperate mother in a quest for finding her Stolen Girl — her kidnapped daughter, to be precise — sounds like a gripping Taken-style thriller. Except that James Kent’s latest movie, best known for The Aftermath and mostly television miniseries such as The White Queen and Fellow Travelers, isn’t as action-packed as it seems to be. Certainly not in the similar vein of say, Taken or Man on Fire.

Inspired by true events, the movie opens with Mara (Kate Beckinsale) cautiously tailing a person at the crowded Middle Eastern market, before Kas Graham and Rebecca Pollock’s screenplay flashes back to eight years earlier. We learn that she’s already divorced and has since shared custody of their little daughter Amina with her ex-husband, Karim (Arvin Kananian). One day, when Mara is visiting a local pharmacy, her daughter wanders around and disappears. Mara does whatever she can to locate her, but the police can’t do much to help her.

Years may have passed since the abduction, but she refuses to give up, and one night, an ex-Marine named Robeson (Scott Eastwood) shows up to offer her a proposition. He turns out to be an expert in locating kidnapped children, and now, he will help find Amina in return for assisting him in tracking down other missing kids. She even gets paid for her effort, figuring she needs all the money for her continuous search for Amina.

Mara reluctantly agrees, and their missions, along with Robeson’s associate, Carl (Jordan Duvigneau), take them from Mexico to Albania and finally, Lebanon. The movie’s narrative shift from Mara’s never-ending quest for finding Amina to joining Robeson and his associate to locate other missing children around the world looks as if the story has sidestepped its main objective. I admit it may come across as an unnecessary filler, but there are still some intriguing moments during their globetrotting missions.

Too bad Kent’s decision to shoot the action scenes in jittery camerawork makes it hard to decipher what’s going on in the movie. Even if he meant to frame the action set pieces in a chaotic, you-are-there urgency made famous by Paul Greengrass-style of filmmaking, at least execute them in a way that the scenes have a sense of visceral flair. The camerawork is sadly an incomprehensible mess, which, in turn, deflates the intensity of the movie.

The movie also drags in some parts, notably the sluggish midsection, where it somehow calls for an obligatory love scene between Mara and Robeson, which frankly doesn’t help much to advance the story. Their on-screen chemistry is rather muted than rightfully earned, and despite Eastwood looking the part playing a no-nonsense character in charge of finding the missing kids, his character barely leaves a lasting impression.

Thankfully, Kate Beckinsale’s above-average performance manages to elevate Stolen Girl, but there is only so much she can do here. It’s a refreshing change of pace for the actress to play an ordinary mother being forced to put through the wringer in searching for her abducted daughter. This is especially true since, in a typical Beckinsale-starred action thriller fashion, she would be given a character who’s an expert of sorts in weaponry and martial arts. Her overall committed performance is mostly the reason that keeps me watching the movie.

Kent may have been lacking the much-needed directorial prowess in the action department, but he feels at home when it comes to addressing the dramatic parts of the movie. Here, Mara isn’t just a standard mother-desperately-trying-to-find-her-child character archetype, as Kent and the screenwriters spend time developing her role as a single mother trying to maintain everything under control, even though she’s struggling to get by.

But she still does her best to take good care of her daughter and her ill-stricken father, Joe, played by Matt Craven. These two are the only closest family members she has, and the fact that Amina ends up being abducted at one point, it’s hard not to root for her panic and frustration of losing her beloved child. Interestingly, Stolen Girl subverts my usual expectation for such a movie involving a kidnapped child, especially with the later scene in the second half. Let’s just say the situation is equivalent to an expectation vs reality angle.

Stolen Girl hits theatres and digital on September 26th.