3 hours ago
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Buckle up, buttercups! Three hours of overstuffed nonsense split into four 45-minute bursts is about to come atcha, and fast.
Vanished stars Kaley Cuoco, who found fame in The Big Bang Theory from 2007-2019, then starred in The Flight Attendant a few years back. Cuoco played an ordinary, if functionally alcoholic, stewardess who found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and enmeshed in an ever-deepening mystery, then mortal peril. She found unexpected reserves of courage and resourcefulness and managed to stay half a step ahead of the bad guys until it was time for vanquishings and comeuppances all round.
In Vanished, she is Alice, an ordinary, non-alcoholic archaeologist, who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and enmeshed in an ever-deepening mystery, then mortal peril. She finds unexpected reserves of courage and resourcefulness and is, I suspect, going to manage to stay half a step ahead of the bad guys until it is time for vanquishings and comeuppances all round.
Alice has been having a long-distance relationship with a pair of cheekbones called Tom (Sam Claflin) for the last four years. Something about the handsome medic she first meets as he saves a group of women and children from bandits appealed to her and they have been meeting in hotel rooms round the world whenever their globetrotting jobs’ itineraries allow. But now Alice has been offered the chance to settle down as a Lecturer in Dusty Old Things (Vanished does not care much about the script. The actors may as well just hold laminated cards up at the screen saying Big Book of Plotting Scenario Two, Option 3a and get through the business even faster and with little lost by way of viewer investment) at Princeton (Harvard is Option 3b). Will Tom join her? He hesitates but – yes, yes he will! They will make a proper go of this thing because they are both as hot as each other – I mean, deeply in love.
To celebrate, he books them a stay in a luxury hotel in Marseille. Alice is delighted until Tom – get this – vanishes from the train that is taking them there. An investigative reporter, Helene (Karin Viard, a respected star in her native France but who is turning in a deeply odd performance here, possibly in disbelief), who happens to be on the train helps Alice convey her concerns to the ticket inspector. But the ticket inspector dismisses them while insisting that she does not go into a private booth just the right size for holding a handsome doctor. Or maybe it is stuffed full of laminated cards. Who can say?
There is nothing for it but for Alice to get to Marseille and report Tom’s disappearance to an equally unconcerned police inspector, Monsieur Drax (Simon Abkarian), who reckons Tom probably took fright at the notion of settling down and escaped between stops, like any normal man would. Sacre bleu! Alice est properly annoyed now. Heureusement, Helene is still around and reminds her that she is an archaeologist and can hunt for clues. Vraiment!
Soon Alice is searching through Tom’s belongings and finding dodgy hotel bills and phone records, plus photos of a woman whose tattoo matches his. She tracks down his former colleague Alex Durand (Matthias Schweighhöfer), who provides some more new information about her boyfriend, being chased by a man on a motorbike, hearing about suspicious deaths and being framed for murder. And then more happens, along with some more, until everyone decides that’s enough and everything stops.
The Flight Attendant was a lot of fun, infusing the caper with comedy, giving the protagonists some backstoried layers, and keeping things just tense and unpredictable enough. And Cuoco was brilliant as a hot mess credibly pulling herself together under duress. Vanished is a pale imitation that gives her nothing to work with, though she does a lot with a little and is always worth watching. Poor Claflin has even less to do. He disappears – obviously – for most of it, and is seen largely in dull flashbacks to the early days of their romance. The laminated cards could have been pinned to a large corkboard saying “Charming, Heroic Love Interest Here” and no one would have been any the wiser, while he waited for something that could build on his success as Billy Dunne in Daisy Jones and the Six.
If you have had a very bad day, Vanished is slight and daft and distracting enough to soothe a fractious soul. Other than that, let us hope both the leads get a chance to show up in something much, much better next time.
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Vanished is on Prime Video now.
