Parents' Guide to Taken in Plain Sight

Taken in Plain Sight certainly has the audience rooting for Abby and the safe return of her daughter Zooey, but little of this feels real. And given the serious nature of the subject—an abduction of a child—this is pretty tension-free. Nor does the solution to the mystery feel like a mystery has actually been solved. The good news is that the adolescent girls were not abducted by pedophiles, just extremely odd people. It's certainly odd that the mom breaks into the home of someone who, despite a lack of evidence, she fervently believes is the perpetrator. The lack of evidence seems an ignorable glitch because she just feels his guilt in her bones. Somehow the police are willing to get a search warrant based on little more than her bones.

After it's all wrapped up, one still wonders how the abductors thought they would have been able to blithely keep the children, and how they thought they could indefinitely keep two growing girls a secret from neighbors and authorities. But it's clear no one involved in the making of this movie was thinking ahead much, leaving many reasonable questions unanswered.