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. 