Customer Reviews

Abandoned [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

When a celebrity passes away it seems we focus on the good that the person did while on Earth and not the bad. A noble thought and one that should be so, but when the case in point is an actor, we then have to deal with the work they left behind, the final films that were yet to be released. Such is the case with ABANDONED and actress Brittany Murphy who was found dead last year. Already completed, the film has just been released on DVD with little or no promotion. Perhaps that's for the best as the film offers nothing new to the thriller genre and a performance that seems phoned in rather than well done by the late Ms. Murphy.

Murphy stars as Mary, a young bank executive on the way to the hospital with her new boyfriend Kevin (Dean Cain) who is due for orthopedic surgery. The hospital is in the process of closing and moving to a new location, but this outpatient surgery shouldn't take more than an hour or so. At least that's what the nurse who takes Kevin's forms tells Mary as she heads to the lounge to wait.

While waiting she meets a nice older man named Cooper (Tim Thomerson) and they talk about his wife and her chemo as well as the hospital. He gives her a few words of reassurance and moves on. After a few hours, Mary heads upstairs concerned that she hasn't had word on Kevin. To her surprise, the nurses on that floor inform her that there according to the computers Kevin is not a patient in the hospital.

After doing a search of the facility on her own while observed by security, Mary is directed to the head of the hospital Mrs. Markham (Mimi Rogers) who gets security to run the tapes of the cameras throughout the hospital for Mary. The only inkling of Kevin walking in is a shoulder shot that could or could not be him. When a police detective named Franklin (Jay Pickett) is called on the scene, they find that Mary is on anti-depressants and suddenly we're left to wonder if perhaps Kevin was imaginary or not.

Taken to be interviewed by the hospital psychiatrist on staff, Dr. Bensley (Peter Bogdanovich), he diagnoses her as mental and in need of observation. But Mary is certain that she's not losing her mind. She knows that Kevin is real. But if so, who is behind his disappearance and why? Is the entire staff of the hospital involved in some major conspiracy or is Mary just not quite all there?

Yes, this sort of story has been done before and better to boot. Rather than offer effective pacing that holds your interest, this movie crawls along at a snails pace and never offers the clues needed to make it an effective mystery. Instead it tries to build up the idea that Mary could be mad, but never does so convincingly or with enough support to make the viewer think that that is the case. We've seen this before, we know she can't be!

Murphy offers little to make this movie believable as well. Her performance seems one note, as if she were walking through it in a daze. The character would have come off better had she not seemed so out of it from the first scene until the last. And her appearance seems more like that of a groupie on the strip than a banking executive, making her even more unbelievable.

I would talk about Dean Cain here but why bother? He seems like a nice, likeable guy but this movie won't do much to raise his star level above direct to video titles. Rogers, a talented actress, is wasted here with nothing more than a few lines. Thomerson (who I think has always been much better than the roles he's been given) does a solid job here but again, the movie itself waste everyone's time and effort.

The film is dedicated at the end to Ms. Murphy. One would do better to revisit the other films she made like CLUELESS or SIN CITY than to remember her for this film.

Every actor has a film that is a stinker but it is a shame that this is the last movie that Brittany Murphy did. I think she was a very good actress and I don't want to remember her in this film. It just was not her best work - not even close. I was very disappointed to say the least.

In "Abandoned" Brittany Murphy is Mary Walsh, a successful businesswoman whose boyfriend Kevin (Dean Cain) went missing in the city's large hospital. Mary is certain Kevin is there for surgery - she had surely arrived there with him - but there is no record of him and no hospital staff remembers Kevin or anything about him. Mary becomes increasingly frantic, but who can she really trust?

It's a familiar situation frequently used in suspense films since the days of Hitchcock, and one recent example is the 2005 "Flightplan," where a desperate heroine attempts to find her beloved one while no one really listens to her. Like the Jodie Foster thriller the story begins with promisingly, then gets incredibly contrived and out of control in the end. Yes, hospital is a nice choice for the story's background, but when the film is over, we realize that "Abandoned" is only a reheated story told much better somewhere else.

"Abandoned" suffers from unimaginative narrative, so many plot holes and uninspired acting from some of the cast, both making us care less and less about the heroine and what is going on around her. It makes me very sad that this tepid straight-to-DVD thriller is the last film of Brittany Murphy, possibly the only reason you want to see the film.

Imagine waking up and taking your boyfriend to the hospital for a routine procedure, only to find out that an hour later he turns up missing. Not in the computer system, not on the grid at all. Pretty devastating, wouldn't it be?


The final movie filmed by the late Brittany Murphy, Abandoned, comes packed with quite the punch. From one twist to another, we chase after Mary who's being chased by hospital administration- to name a few, who think she's lost her mind. She's leading to believe that her boyfriend Kevin, Dean Cain, has gone missing and not a single employee believes her. When Detective Franklin, Jay Pickett, steps in to investigate he finds more than he bargained for. After a day of thinking this super blond psycho fits the bill, he gives up his efforts to help her only to later find the answers to solve the puzzle.

This bone tingling suspense thriller will put viewers at the edge of their seats, chomping at finger nails and picking at those loose fibers on the cushions in the couch! Miss Murphy will be greatly missed, however this movie is sure to go down in the history of Cinema for the excellence in its dramatic prose.

Rest In Peace, Brittany. This movie serves her fans some closure, if you will, and shall be included as part of her wonderful Filmography

This is a Twilight Zone-like story of a young woman whose boyfriend goes in for surgery, but a few hours later, there is no record of him ever being in the hospital. We come to find out that she is not crazy, though, and there is much more going on than we, or she, had ever realized. Some great suspenseful scenes.

I believe this was Brittany Murphy's last movie prior to her passing. A great shame and sadness because she was a very talented actress. This movie may have been a small production, but it really shines out and grabs you. It has a great plot with drama, mystery and that big question that we all like to ask ourselves, "did he or she do it, or is there going to be a big twist at the end?" And so on. This movie is fast pacing and has you hooked from the first start. I only wish that Brittany was still here to continue to share her talents.

I've always been a fan of Brittany's and as usual we weren't disappointed in the least .The innocence she portrayed in this movie was unforgettable .Dean Cain was an awesome pairing with her in this movie to.I love the way I kept guessing if she was having a nervous breakdown and there were so many twists and turns but all the questions I had was answered .So sad she has passed away at such a young age because it seems there aren't many actresses who throw themselves into a role like she
did.

This is Brittany Murphy's last movie, as noted, so one might as well start with her performance, which is not precisely convincing (one might expect that a bank would require its higher-ranking employees to confine themselves to one hair color at a time) but is interesting. Actresses in these Lifetime-ish "suspense" dramas typically perform their roles in a way that is characterized by burning faux-intensity and fraudulent righteousness; maybe for reasons personal as much as histrionic, Murphy acts with an edge of fragile uncertainty and a kind of foggy blurriness that is peculiarly and increasingly compelling. For example, when she is racing in and out of hospital rooms trying to find her missing boyfriend, and her distressed queries are met with poorly-suppressed annoyance and indifference by employees who cannot comprehend her panic and just want to get back to their jobs, Murphy doesn't do the cliche "I want answers and I want them now!" that we've come to expect; instead, she wobbles hesitantly, timidly tries again, then shrinks embarrassedly at a fresh rebuff. In other words, behaves more as someone actually would in such a situation, and is the more touching for it.

Dean Cain is also good as her boyfriend, and handles both sides of his, shall we say, "equivocal"--ambivalent?--role with equal believability.

Of course, pretty much all detective-mystery-suspense movies have plot holes, whether they are made well, or, as here, not. But in a good movie they are incidental and forgivable; in "Abandoned", it almost seems as if the ambition were to see if a movie could be made entirely out of plot holes strung together with an occasional connective tissue of almost-believability. I will give only two examples, but be assured they do not constitute a lonely pair; first, I find it unlikely that the villain would not only carry around a book that describes his intended crime in fine detail, but make it fully accessible to his planned victim, and in fact even encourage her (unsuccessfully!) to read it--BEFORE he carries out his evil scheme. Secondly, although the scheme itself is perfectly reasonable, it is breathtaking to realize--at the moment one does--that its whole execution, as carried out in such a public and populated place as a medical center, and overlarded as it is with a pretend love affair, a mysterious disappearance that (deliberately?!) gets the whole hospital in an uproar involving the police, and then a fake kidnapping, etc etc, all to coerce someone into doing something, is not only horribly risky, but stupefyingly unnecessary. The bad guys could have skipped all of that complicatedly painstaking nonsense if they'd just gone to her house and put a gun to her head.

The basic concept (is he or she crazy ... or not?) obviously isn't new and it has been a theme in many stories. But if a film is good I don't care if it's the re-telling of a tale I've heard dozens of times.

I wish I had passed on this renting this movie. It was plagued with cheesy dialogue, weak performances and directing that was mediocre at best (I'm being nice). It reminded me of a made-for-TV movie - the kind with one or two well known actors that you haven't seen in a while (I'm certainly not referring to Brittany M.) - so you say "what the heck" and kill a couple of hours to see if they can still act or you get sucked in enough to stick it out just to see how the story ends. Sometimes you're impressed, and other times you really wish you had changed the channel before curiosity got the better of you.

I hate to sound so critical because I like Brittany Murphy, which is why I watched this to begin with. I've seen decent performances by some of her costars in the past, but they didn't stand a chance in this train wreck. I don't feel like I wasted an hour and a half of my life because I've suffered through films so painful to watch that it is was a huge relief when the credits finally started to roll. But then again, it's going to be hard not to rank this movie into that category based solely on the fact that it was painful to see Brittany Murphy in such an obvious state of bad health. She was barely a shadow of her former self, and I think it's a shame that her last performance made that so plainly obvious.

Ok so I read the reviews and thought this was going to be a pretty bad and disappointing movie. I ordered it anyway since it was Brittany Murphy's last film she made before passing away. From the beginning to the end, I could not believe that what I was watching was the same movie I read such disappointing reviews about.

I read it was predictable. No it's not. Of course it has it's "AHA" moments later on. And sure you might decide someone's a shady character or something's off about them from the beginning, but you still don't know why. That's true and should be true in every movie. That's how things are put together as to why everything we've seen to that point has happened. That's much different than being predictable. Brittany's acting was perfect for the role and character she was playing. People have said it's not the Brittany we've seen in other movies. Acting depends on what the movie's about and the person becoming that character for the situation at hand. She does that perfectly.

I read so many ppl focusing on her clothing.. such as since she's a business woman, she sure isn't dressed like one which takes away from her character. I don't know about you, but when I have a day off, you're going to see me dressed very casually. She's not playing a woman at work so why would she be dressed for it. It's kinda like seeing some helpless woman running around in the woods with some crazy man chasing her while she has heels on. That's laughable because it doesn't fit. Her character in a business outfit wouldn't fit because the business part of her life is what she does.. it's not a reflection of the character she's playing in this particular situation.

With all that said, the premise of the movie is boyfriend and girlfriend Mary (Murphy) and Kevin (Dean Cain). He has a torn ACL and is going in for routine surgery at the hospital. The nurse says it will only take about an hour. Mary waits for a few hours and still no word from anyone. She goes to the nurses station to get some info, only to find out his name isn't in the system, the nurse who was there before surgery is a nurse nobody has heard of, the Dr. doing the surgery is on vacation, and that particular floor didn't have any patients.

She does what any girlftiend would do and tries to find the answers to where Kevin is... yet the evidence seems to suggest he doesn't even exist. That's where it all begins. To say more would be giving away the whole story which many ppl do for some reason; I don't.

This was a very well done movie with many twists and turns of trying to put the pieces of this strange puzzle together. Murphy is great as Mary, and shouldn't be compared to other movies she's been in since this isn't those movies. Base your opinion on THIS movie alone, THIS situation, THIS character, and then make your decision on whether it was a good movie or not. You can't take a comedy role and a very dramatic role and say the drama wasn't good because it wasn't as good as the comedy. You can't even take movies of the same genre because they're completely different movies.

If I was asked if this was my favorite Brittany Murphy movie, the answer would be no. But that's not because this movie wasn't good.. it's just a preference of favorites. I was pleasantly surprised and very glad I ordered this movie, despite all the negative reviews from others.