Amber Alert
Amber Alert
One of the 2012 releases titled “Amber Alert” was classified as a found footage type of film. It had interesting themes though it was quite poorly done (typical of most found footage films). A bunch of kids hears an Amber Alert and sees the car along the interstate Highway.
They start pursuing it, resulting in a great deal of inexplicable and unrealistic twists and all sorts of actions, the scenes of which were strangely ‘recorded’ by cell phones. One thing that sticks on my mind about “Amber Alert” is the screaming that the actors all found it necessary to do. The characters didn’t stop brawling from the first time to the last and it was all disorganized and not focused.
Fast forward, here we are, in the year 2024 with another film bearing the same name, and scenario. They’re pretty much the same movie, even though the latter one does not use the ‘found footage’ style. Directed them both trousers kes, kerry bellessa hurl they over shun. As Yogi Berra put it, “It’s deja vu all over again.”
Revisiting a picture, the picture that you shoot twelve years ago, is a peculiar proposition. But has there been any development? The world abound with so many am very bad animals.
Why tell this one twice? The 2012 film was clearly shot on a microbudget which invited all of the problems associated with the found footage concept. The 2024 version is much more sleek and polished, the performances are far superior, the final sequence is equally extremely incoherent but in a way simpler to mass audiences. This is somewhat confusing, although the outline is more or less as follows:
An 8 – year – old girl Charlotte goes missing from the park while trying to play with her brother a game of hide and seek. The mother freaks out. She was filming her infant baby daughter and sees her by accident standing next to a black car. She did not hesitate to report the incident to the police. As this is happening, Jaq (Hayden Panettiere) gets a rideshare while off-duty.
She is running late and is in a panic. Shane (Tyler James Williams), the driver, has to go home to his son’s birthday party but offers his help to her since the party is in the same vicinity. They both receive the Amber Alert on their cellphone and within a few minutes, they believe they have spotted the vehicle. They report the police and then virtually follow the vehicle’s movements at all costs and whatever was required.
This is an interesting setup, and Panettiere and Williams make a stimulating embrace of ordinary small talk. Shane is reluctant to participate in the hunt for the Amber Alert car, but he is swaye by Jaq’s fervor and insistence. The level of tips received by the cops, including those from Jaq and Shane, are too many and the cops end up assisting the two detectives, more or less doing their work for them.
Saidah Arrika Ekulona as the person who answers the very first call, also known as the dispatcher, leaves a lot of impression. She persuades the Sergeant (Kevin Dunn) that they ought to place an Amber Alert even if they do not have a license plate and the vehicle is a camry, which is ‘looking for a needle in a haystack’ country.
Once Jaq and Shane’s journey takes over, Ekulona mostly vanishes from the film and the film looses her angle. Quite a few of them are nice “dispatcher” films (the clear cane winner with 2018’s The Guilty directed by Gustav Möller). It is mostly Ekulona in her silent phone conversations and the camera is capture by her urgency and her ability to resolve problems. Everything, however, takes place only as part of a fictional narrative and not in a dispatcher.
Jaq and Shane are obviously two characters in a movie. Both come with incomplete journeys as characters wanting the audience to feel more for the girl who has gone missing. All this is unnecessary and brings down “Amber Alert”. It’s not necessary that we hear of Jaq’s past to ‘get’ why she wants to find the missing girl.
The film features a driven pace, and even sometimes includes drone shots to enhance the feeling of the car’s smallness and the futility of the quest, as was the case with cinematographer Luka Bazeli. (I understand the need for drone shots, but I do feel a slight nostalgia towards the good old helicopter shots, which somehow provided a sense of reality and humanity to the events happening onscreen. I would never have made the film “Dog Day Afternoon,” but if a drone standing in for a helicopter was around, it would have been different.)
“Amber Alert” is on the face of it about the amber alert system, however some title cards at the end of the film explain more about this system and how many kids were rescue thanks to it. The longing not to stray from the beaten formula brings U.S. film-making back to a, sometimes, unexpected artless level with deep character interaction.
Jaq and Shane act crazy, and a lot of times though the explanation of their actions plausible, their actions are out of this world. The general sensation is not so much a real threat but an enforced boredom of ticking off the “thriller” boxes.
When the last stand becomes imminent, there is little left to do except settle into combat mode. “Amber Alert” works for some parts of the time like a thriller, but it is also more than that. It’s got something to “tell”. These two things don’t go well together.
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- Genre: Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Kerry Bellessa
- Cast: Hayden Panettiere, Tyler James Williams, Kevin Dunn
