ABANDON

A college hottie, troubled by the fact that her boyfriend has been AWOL for an awfully long time, finally gets help in finding him from a handsome, recovering-alcoholic detective.

CAST: Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, Charlie Hunnam, Zooey Deschanel, Gabrielle Union, Will McCormack, Mark Feuerstein, Melanie Jayne Linskey

DIRECTOR: Stephen Gaghan

Katie Holmes, troubled student Her boyfriend's gone missing

"It's a bad sign in a thriller when you instantly know whodunit...Crossing 'A Beautiful Mind' with 'Sex Kittens Go to College,' first-time director Stephen Gaghan (he wrote 'Traffic') causes a head-on collision." --Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"There are spooky dark-house shots with knives lurking ominously in the foreground, plenty of dripping walls and derelict building interiors, trippy fantasy sequences, hallucinations, flashbacks, throbbing techno on the soundtrack--and the whole thing is prominently steeped in a ghostly blue. None of it camouflages the pedestrian nature of the script, as it plods toward a conclusion Mr. Magoo could see coming a mile off." -- Megan Turner, The New York Post

"Consider the title your best advice. These 99 minutes roll by like 99 years...Although writer-director Stephen Gaghan tries to make a deeper deal out of this mystery-thriller genre than you'd normally expect, his efforts cost him cohesion, story and logic...As for a climactic twisteroo, it's a left-field clanger that brings a bad movie to a shuddering halt." --Desson Howe, The Washington Post

"... a picture so moody that physicians might want to prescribe Prozac for it...there's so little going on in the film that its title seems to suggest an action that audiences may be driven to take before the movie ends...'Abandon' seeks to examine curdled ambition but in the end simply seems to suffer from it." --Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"'Abandon' is all buildup and no payoff, a mystery that essentially offers only two alternative solutions, which diminishes the element of surprise and strings the viewer along way past caring which possibility proves to be true...Amid a flurry of fast forwards and flashbacks, 'Abandon' proves to be more contrived than inspired." --Kevin Thomas, The Los Angeles Times