Caught the first five or so minutes of this Michelle Pfeiffer flic before I noticed something better was on, but I’d still like to know what happened in the end. The boy was kidnapped, gone for nine years, then reunited with his parents. How? Who took him? I know the answer will be far from earthshaking, as the trailers for the film made it out to be more of a tearjerker than a thriller.
Pulling from memory what I recall about this crappy film…
[SPOILERS FOLLOW]
Ok…Michelle Pfeiffer’s in the hotel lobby with her two kids (aged 6 and 3, or thereabouts) when she turns around for a second, and lo and behold, one of them is gone. They search frantically for him, no luck. Whoopi Goldberg plays a cop who leads the missing persons investigation. For some reason, the film makes a big deal out of the fact that she’s a lesbian. Damn PC times.
Fast forward about 9 years later, and suddenly, a boy shows up on the mom’s doorstep offering to mow her lawn. Michelle is all but CERTAIN that it’s her missing son. She finally convinces Whoopi to reopen the case, they confirm its really him, and arrest the boy’s dad, but release him when they realize he’s innocent. Turns out that he married a woman a few years ago who was the REAL kidnapper, and she’s dead now. They had actually lived in another state and only recently moved to the very same street where the boy used to live.
That amazing coincidence was a helluva lot easier to swallow than the treacle that followed. You see, the kid knows no other family other than his dead kidnapper mom and his stepdad, he doesn’t even go by the same name anymore. So the last hour or so is just about how he adjust to his “new” family, and whether or not it’s even right for him to suddenly be uprooted from the home he always believed he belonged to. Good performance by Ryan Merriman (the kid who got kidnapped), somewhat less so by everyone else, especially Pfeiffer, who cries and screams a lot, and Whoopi acts like she’s just in it for the paycheck. The older kid (who’s a teenager now) gets arrested for something I can’t remember, while in jail he has a heart-to-heart with his brother, and the last scene seems very artificial where they all hug each other and express caring for each other and all that.
There, I just saved two hours of your life. I expect due payment in return. 
The movie pissed me off because it leaves out the conversation the mother and Ben (age 3) have right before he’s kidnapped. Besides being a rather hauntingly written scene, it also explains why the book is titled the what it is! Don’t bother with the movie, the book is much more coherent.
The woman who kidnapped Ben was a class-mate of the mother–she had gone to Chicago for her High School reunion. They even saw the lady for a bit in the hotel, just before the reunion, and the police did consider her a suspect, but for some reason never followed up on it. Ben still felt more connected to his kidnapper and her husband than he did to his real/blood family; he had very few memories of them since he was 2-3 when kidnapped.
The performance of Jonathan Jackson in this movie (he was the older brother, Vincent) was excellent, IMPO. 
tarragon
Thanks!
What did they talk about? Tell me, tell me, 'cause I’m not gonna read the book!
I give up. I typed out the whole 1.5 page scene and the hamsters logged me off the board somehow and ate the post.
Crud. Can you e-mail it to me? Pretty please?
Ben remembers hiding in a box when he was 3. Suddenly, he remembers the family he’d lost 9 years ago.
I saw it on a trans-continental flight. Hey, there was nothing else to do.
Sorry, I don’t have the will to re-type it. Look for the book in the library: it’s pages 75-6 in the paperback(end of chapter 3). You could read it right then and there
It was a good book, worth reading. Although wrenching. I mean, there are NO truly happy endings in a scenario like that.
Will do!