Late one night in a working class New Jersey suburb, a bloodied woman staggers mute and dazed into the emergency room at the Dempsy Medical Center. After treatment for shock and hysteria, Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) recounts to Dempsy police detective Lorenzo Council (Samuel L. Jackson) -- a horrific tale of being carjacked on the isolated strip of undeveloped land that divides Dempsy's urban housing projects from the blue collar town of Gannon, where she lives. She claims she was forced out of her car by a black man, but during the interrogation Council senses he's not getting the whole story. Only after hours of questioning does Brenda finally break down and confess that her four-year-old son, Cody, was asleep in the back seat of the stolen car. Led by activist Karen Collucci (Edie Falco), members of the communities of Dempsy and Gannon unite in a search for the missing child, but the criminal investigation into the alleged kidnapping by a suspect who is presumed to be a local from the projects soon ignites long-simmering racial tensions between the two towns.

The movie has a secret and unlike many movies that I have a secret they keep it under wraps until they decide to let us an audience know what that secret is. That is partly why the movie works if not entirely at least enough to be entertaining as while the movie is flawed you can’t help but try and figure out where the movie is going and what the secret is. This movie reminded me of lesser Flightplan as it wasn’t as well executed but was smart enough to give nothing away in the trailers or in the movie for that matter keeping you glued to your seat throughout. They at least learned from the mistakes that the last Julianne Moore movie made in Forgotten and that was giving everything away right in the trailer. Where you think you are going isn’t where you end up going and that makes it work, that makes a movie you’ll probably want to see once and never again and that’s ok we can’t love every movie we see.

Now what makes this just a good movie instead of a great one is that it is very flawed and doesn’t bother to fix those flaws. The first one is the cliché’s from Samuel L. Jackson being the hard nosed cop who cares about his community (Jackson has a limited range and the bad ass is a good part for him so stop trying to give his characters humanity and take him back to his Pulp Fiction Days). Or to the white woman who cares and is part of a black community, the movie overplays the race card to try and make a point but it never really lets you know what that point is. Is it that white people will overstep their bounds if one of their own is in jeopardy and not if a black person is. They shoot that theory themselves by having the cop who leads the invasion on black turf be the Uncle to the missing child. Most of us black or white would have done the same if one of our family had gone missing. Is it that we can live in harmony and that tragedy will bring us together, if that’s the point the movie is trying to make the ending ruins that. The movie should have just been a movie, forget the politics, forget trying to make a point, just tell the story and let the audience decide if it was worth their time.

I have never been that much of a fan of Julianne Moore’s but she always seemed a capable actress but wow does she overact in the movie. She is so over the top that her performance will make you cringe at times and do what an actor should never do get you to stop suspending disbelief. She can almost draw you out of the story which is very intriguing and the best part of the movie and that’s a shame for her and for the director for letting her go on like she does. And like I said before Samuel L. Jackson is better off just as the bad ass he doesn’t have much range and you really can’t force him out of it without hurting the movie. I am not talking over the top ridiculousness like the Man, I am talking xXx or Swat he worked as a police officer in these movies and they could have learned from watching him in these movies. The acting sadly does take a little bit away from a movie that was ok if nothing spectacular and you will be entertained you just need to decide if that’s enough.

Grade: C+