WhatzUp

Abandon
by Derek Neff

I had heard mostly bad things about writer/director Steven Gaghan’s new movie Abandon, but I wanted to see it anyway, both because Gaghan had written the adapted screenplay for Traffic, which I liked, and because, well, I sort of dig Katie Holmes. So I rented Abandon thinking that at the worst I would get to watch Ms. Holmes wasting her considerable talents in a bad movie. But you know what? Abandon ain’t half bad.

Perhaps the best thing about Abandon is that, although it has been marketed as a thriller, the movie itself — at least much of the way through — doesn’t seem to realize it is a thriller. Mostly, it is a character study involving Katie Burke, a college senior whose boyfriend has been mysteriously missing for two years, and Wade Handler (Benjamin Bratt), the detective who has been assigned to the case of finding said boyfriend Embry (played in flashback by Charlie Hunnam). Katie, a dedicated student with high ambitions, is struggling through her senior thesis, and Wade, a recovering alcoholic, is strangely compelled to keep after Katie until he can crack the case.

The dialogue in Abandon often sparkles; Gaghan clearly knows what he’s doing on the screenwriting front. However, the movie eventually wakes up and realizes that as a thriller it does actually need to start “thrilling” us, and it is as this point that it stumbles. Ex-boyfriend Embry, it seems, has come back to town to terrorize Katie and her friends, but since we have already seen him in flashbacks, it’s a big leap for us to begin to accept him as a villain. The climax of the movie is supposed to blow our minds (it’s one of those surprise endings that is meant to make us reevaluate everything we’ve seen up to now), but I for one saw it coming about half an hour earlier. As a thriller, Abandon doesn’t measure up, but I enjoyed it as a character study of a disturbed young woman and the flawed detective who falls for her.