hyped garbage

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Brittany checks her boyfriend into the hospital for routine out patient surgery. After a while he disappears without a trace. He is not in the hospital records. Brittany has a history of psychological disorders and appears to be unsure herself. Little by little Brittany finds clues to convince herself she is not crazy and her boyfriend is real. She runs around the hospital in a frantic search as the staff try to catch her.Brittany Murphy's doll face is in nearly every scene. The acting was good, the plot was so-so as the "is it real?" didn't carry through until the very end as the movie shifts from a suspense-thriller to an action-drama.If you enjoyed "Shutter Island", you might want to check out this movie or vice-versa.

There's nothing much to the plot, which is fairly familiar. Someone we know to be real vanishes under ordinary circumstances and is tracked down by a friend or family member. Nobody remembers ever having seen the person who disappeared. Sometimes the motive for the kidnapping is some secret code ("The Lady Vanishes"), sometimes the victim is involuntarily sequestered because he has some disease ("So Long At The Fair"), sometimes jealousy ("Bunny Lake is Missing"). Here he's simply kidnapped from a hospital for money but it's not revealed until the end. Actually, that's not entirely the end.It was shot in Los Angeles with no stars but it was better than I expected for a couple of reasons. (1) No exploding fireballs. (2) No stupendous car crashes. I suppose that the low budget could account for the absence of these clichés, but one cliché that was missing would have cost nothing to include.Ordinarily when the protagonist has an unusual story to tell, she finds that no one will believe her. She dashes from person to person, agency to agency, desperately trying to get her story out, and everyone she meets shrugs it off as a delusion or some sort of humdrum error in the computer system. When, FINALLY, she does meet a sympathetic listener who is willing to help, she turns to blubber and begins to speak gibberish -- "He seemed so REAL! He was wearing a puce fustian cape and a motley foolscap with bells on it!" Well, I don't know what happened to that scene. The diminutive Brittany Murphy, with her stringy blond tresses, deep-set dark eyes, and wide, pulpy mouth, never once goes to pieces, despite multiple opportunities. She acts in a reasonable but increasingly frustrated manner throughout. Never mind the overplayed villainous roles or the melancholy performance by Peter Bogdanovitch as a helpless psychiatrist.One of the first hospital people she queries is a tall, burly guy with a buzz cut and an unfriendly expression. She describes her missing boy friend -- "A little over six feet, black hair, dark eyes." "I haven't seen anyone of that description," replies the Security Agent. (The description fits 90% of Homo sapiens. Is he blind, or is this Iceland?) The real climax is inexplicable. A detective wanders into someone's house, picks up a book, and reads the entire plot of the movie he now finds himself in. Ten million dollars seems to appear from nowhere.But -- come to think of it -- there's another missing cliché. Murphy is being pursued through the bowels of the hospital by the armed, burly Security Agent. He pauses in a room crowded with large pipes. She steps out and beans him with an iron pipe. He falls to the floor, blood on his head. The terrified girl slowly advances to pick up the pistol lying next to him. This is the point at which the "dead body" should come roaring back to life and grab her by the throat. But no. Another opportunity either overlooked or, very sensibly, skipped deliberately.The heck with it. Two extra points for the two missing clichés. Call me a Franciscan fool.

I watched this on TV and it thoroughly entertained me and kept me through the commercials (which were plenty). I was kind of shocked that the reviews were so bad, it was a fairly decent movie. I would probably give it a eight out of ten but I'm giving it a 10 out 10 because I am so appalled by the reviews that I have to raise the score. It was good and kept me hooked throughout the entire time. I am one of those people who usually don't write reviews but in this case (to raise the score) I have to write a review. The acting was good, the story was interesting (I had a pretty bad idea of where the story was going) and it was engaging from the beginning to the end. I definitely recommend the movie.

*NO SPOILERS UNTIL VERY END - CLEARLY MARKED*As a fan of Brittany Murphy it truly saddens me that Abandoned turned out to be her last film due to the fact that it is a complete mess filled with nonsense. This movie is very low budget and the acting is debatable at best but I am willing to overlook all of that if the plot is interesting and there is a good payoff in the end, something necessary in every basic mystery thriller with a twist. I don't hate Abandoned because it was cheaply made - not every film has the luxury of having a big budget or access to well known actors - I hate it simply because it's awful.Mary (Murphy) and her boyfriend Kevin (Dean Cain) go to the hospital so he can have outpatient orthopedic surgery. The procedure is supposed to last an hour so after spending some time with him in his hospital room as he fills out paperwork, she leaves to wait until he is finished. After hours and no sign of her boyfriend, she starts asking around and shockingly there is no sign of him anywhere; he isn't in the system and no nurses have heard of him. The Dr. that was supposedly doing his surgery wasn't working that day and the nurse, Amanda, that Mary saw with Kevin that morning didn't exist.What happened to her boyfriend? Does he even exist? Is Mary crazy and making the whole thing up? After a massive search for Kevin turns up nothing and some anti-depressant pills fall out of Mary's purse, people start to suspect that she's unstable which leads to Mary having to prove that she isn't delusional and that Kevin was with her that morning and really disappeared.Of course there is your basic twist that explains what is really going on and honestly, it's nothing everyone hasn't seen before. It's a mystery/thriller by numbers and the action scenes at the end leave a LOT to be desired. It was a bad sign when I realized that I didn't care at all what happened to the boyfriend half way through. I found the film to be somewhat boring & I had no connection with any of the characters. One thing I must comment on is Brittany Murphy's hair/makeup in Abandoned. It was distractingly awful and it has nothing to do with how sick she may or may not have been while shooting this film (I am pretty sure she didn't become ill until after) - it has to do with the colors and styling used. Her hair looked like someone put in brillo pad/horse hair like extensions and then crimped them a little and then greased it all down. It looked like her hair hadn't been washed in a month and was also oddly stiff as if it wouldn't move an inch even in a wind storm. The color was beyond atrocious - some weird cat pee orange/yellow color with dark roots and I don't know what happened to her eyebrows but they were odd as well in color. Were they bleached? Was powder brushed over them? I don't even know. The makeup shades were awful, especially the 80's style blush and lipstick. I read that her husband did her makeup but she must have approved it before shooting which is something I just don't understand.3/10 - Bad acting (Brittany Murphy & Jay Picket are the exceptions), low budget look and awful awful plot and execution. My 2 biggest gripes below. ***************SPOILERS***********There was a lot of stupid nonsense in this movie but the 2 worst were:1) The main reason why I rated this film so low was the asinine plot point with the cop/book that was contingent on him saving the day in the end. The movie wants me to believe that it's plausible that he would take Mary's book, quickly flip through it and instantly flip right to the page that just so happens to map out the boyfriend's scheme which clued the cop in and sent him running back to the hospital to rescue Mary. Seriously? I have seen some ridiculous moments in movies but this was easily a Top 10. How many pages was that book? 200 something easy and he flips right to the exact one with the plot that magically was all written on one page for quick, easy reading, reads it and connects the dots. Pathetic.2) A call goes out that 3 armed suspects in a grey sedan are entering the hospital over the police radio. Super cop shows up, rams a lady in a gray sedan, yanks her out of the car and throws her in the back of his cop car. Huh? No make or model was included in the report so how did Super cop know that the woman was apart of the money scheme? Grey sedans are very popular. She surely didn't have the 2 other suspects with her and wasn't seen carrying a weapon to the point where he would have seen it through the windows of the car. Of course the woman was Amanda and was one of the bad people but still, the way he just grabbed her was ridiculous.