The Forgotten: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

Directed by Joseph Ruben, written by Gerald Di Pego, 91 minutes, rated PG-13.

Choosing a title for a movie is crucial yet tricky business. For instance, should you decide to call your movie about a sweet-natured, bovine-loving girl “Cow Patty,” you certainly don’t want it to smell like one to audiences. I mean, imagine the headlines should “Cow Patty” be a stinker.

Such is the case with “The Forgotten,” a dumb movie about a handful of dead children who are mysteriously forgotten by most of their parents.

What nobody attached to this beauty likely wanted from audiences is the sort of negative word of mouth that found them saying, “Forget it,” to their friends. But just try stopping them. “The Forgotten” is beyond forgettable—it’s amnesiatic--standing tall as one of the lamest, most ill-conceived movies of the year.

In it, the fine actress, Julianne Moore, proves she can be rather abominable given the wrong part.

Here, she’s Telly Paretta, a grieving mother of dead son, Sam (Christopher Kovaleski), who is told by her psychiatrist, Dr. Munce (Gary Sinise), and her husband, Jim (Anthony Edwards), that she never had a child. In fact, Telly is informed that she’s a psychotic who miscarried. Her vivid memories of her son and her maternal bond with him are the stuff of fiction, wholly manufactured by her warped psyche.

Tenacious Telly believes otherwise, which leads her to Ash (Dominic West), a former professional hockey player who turned to the drink after the death of his daughter, which he somehow forgot.

After some rather embarrassing, emotional histrionics from Ash, he remembers his daughter and soon both he and Telly are on the case, which in this case means they’re on the run from a band of creepy, dark-suited evildoers out to undo them.

And, my, do they all run. In this movie, people do more running than anyone in “Chariots of Fire” and “Forrest Gump” combined. They run through the streets of Manhattan, they run over bridges, they run through fields, abandoned buildings and airplane hangars, and they even run through exploding glass windows without once getting cut by the flying debris.

More astonishing is what Telly and Ash are running toward--the truth--which won’t be revealed here, though the television ads and the film’s trailer freely suggest it’s steeped in some sort of weird science fiction. When the vague, murky conclusion hits, the letdown is as colossal as Alfre Woodard’s wig. Woodard plays a detective in “The Forgotten,” and while she’s the best part of the movie, my feeling is that she’ll probably want to join the rest of the cast in forgetting all of this.

Grade: D-

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