Desperate Hours: An Amber Alert

Personally, I really liked this movie. Others didn't, but we all have our different tastes. I found it suspenseful and I was drawn into the plight of the two teenage girls. The story is about them being kidnapped and the efforts of their families and the police to find them. There really wasn't much about the police work. As one of the moms described it, the basic attitude of the police was "we've done the paperwork, now we wait."

The kidnapper was played by Tom Berenger. He actually accomplished the difficult task of making me a little bit sympathetic to his character. As he put it, he never wanted to kidnap anyone - he just wanted to steal a car and he ended up with the girls. But he never hurt them, and never really touched them aside from tying and taping them. I'm not saying he was a good guy - just a guy who got in over his head and in the end paid a very high price for it.

My biggest criticism of this is that it focuses too much on some family melodrama (even including the family of the police chief heading the search) which didn't really add anything important to the story and was just at the expense of following the plight of the girls. But basically this worked pretty well, I thought.