MISSING (B+) - Incredibly frenetic and a little frazzling, "Missing" follows a young adult using her phone and computer almost exclusively to solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance during a planned trip to Colombia with a new boyfriend. As gimmicks go, this one is pretty slick; you're not just watching someone play with a computer screen but rather getting sucked into her online world.
Storm Reid (from HBO's "The Last of Us" and "Euphoria") plays June, the snarky daughter of Grace (Nia Long), whom we also see in a videotaped flashback to when June was a toddler, just before the girl lost her father. When Grace doesn't return to LAX from Colombia, June starts sleuthing online. Through TaskRabbit she finds Javier (a delightful Joaquim de Almeida), who goes way above and beyond his usual handyman duties to provide key private-eye assistance.
The FBI also gets involved, and it's eye-opening to watch all of the tools June utilizes at her fingertips. She uses translation programs to talk to the hotel staff. She unearths key documents. She IMs and face-times; she tracks down public video-camera footage; and she hacks emails and social-media accounts. Soon the intrigue has built to a real-world climax.
Writer-directors Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick, in their feature debut, hurtle this story along for nearly two hours, never letting the plot sag. After peeling the onion with some engaging slow reveals, they pack the final reel with a couple of clever twists that turn this into a compelling mystery thriller. It all revolves around Reid, who has a grand command of the big screen, with beefy supporting roles from the likes of Ken Leung (TV's "Lost") as the creepy boyfriend. It all adds up to pleasing pulp.
MINDHORN (2015) (B-minus) - About as lightweight as they come, this British parody has the thinness of a sitcom as it follows a vain, washed-up TV actor who slips back into his old detective character to help police on the Isle of Man solve a murder and avoid more killings. It is silly and stupid, but it has enough gags to justify its feature length. It also has strong performances that lifts it above the riff-raff.
This comes from the minds of Julian Barratt, who stars as the hack actor Richard Thorncroft, and Simon Farnaby as Clive, who worked as Richard's stunt double on the '80s drama "Mindhorn," a poor man's "Matt Houston." A suspected killer is obsessed with the Mindhorn character, and so the local police ring up the balding, pot-bellied Thorncroft to once again don the cheesy orange leather jacket and his bionic eyepatch (which allows Mindhorn to see the truth) to revive his TV persona and lure the killer into custody.
Don't overthink this. Steve Coogan is on hand as Thorncroft's rival, Peter Easterman, who went on to become a movie star. Andrea Riseborough is amusing as a mousy detective. The eminent Kenneth Branagh and Simon Callow ("Room With a View," "Four Weddings and a Funeral") play themselves, dispensing some very British inside jokes. It all zings by in an hour and a half.
Barratt and Farnaby toss in some subtle comic flourishes -- for some reason, Thorncroft finds his inner Mindhorn only while wearing very specific footwear -- and the comedy is as deadpan as they come. Thorncroft is a blowhard and a buffoon, and while this has the feel of a show within a show, it never becomes too cartoonish. You can almost sense Quentin Tarantino taking notes for the washed-up TV action star he centers things around in "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," and you can still enjoy the simple send-ups of all the cop shows that came after "Mannix." (In turn, "Mindhorn" cops a few gags from the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" video.)
The hunt for the killer is almost an afterthought, but Barratt and Farnaby wrap things up nicely, and Mindhorn once again gets his day in the sun.
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