'Not Forgotten' review

Paz Vega and Simon Baker (Credit: Myriad)

American Jack Bishop (Simon Baker) lives in a Texas town bordering Mexico with his beautiful second wife Amaya (Paz Vega) and 11-year-old daughter Toby (Chloe Moretz) from his first marriage to Katie (Claire Forlani). When Toby goes missing, Jack enters a dark subculture involving the religious sect La Santa Muerte (the Holy Death), a cultish offshoot of Catholicism.

The buzz: After years of film work ("The Devil Wears Prada," "L.A. Confidential") and almost hit TV shows ("The Guardian," "Smith"), Australian-born Baker became a bona fide TV star last year thanks to the instant success of CBS' "The Mentalist." That might provide a small boost to the limited release for this pre-"Mentalist" thriller from commercial director Dror Soref, which otherwise could've gone direct to DVD.

The verdict: A haphazard mess that would've been better off aspiring to camp, not chills. Everything about this movie is erratic—from the performances to the milieu to the depiction of the cult—there's no sense of control or, for that matter, a point. Violent flashbacks, gratuitous nudity from strippers and prostitutes and vaguely supernatural facial distortions all factor in, as does a thoroughly pointless voiceover from Toby, which explains things that could have been conveyed visually in a better film, and only illuminates how ridiculous the story is. "Not Forgotten" is the opposite of a good thriller, it gets less interesting with each scene.

Did you know? Apparently "Fast & Furious" star Jordana Brewster was originally set to play Vega's role. Sometimes actors get lucky with the films they don't make.

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