Warning: This movie should not be seen by anyone under the age of 16All parents and teenagers (16 years or older) should watch this movie in an effort to become more aware of your surroundings and to understand that evil predators exist amongst us. In real life, there remains thousands of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, who have been left wondering what happened to their tiny angel(s) on that one tragic day that seemed to start out just like any other day, when the child was left unattended for just a few minutes only to go missing forever more. This is a tragedy and mystery that occurs every day across North America and we always think it won't happen to our own family.Stolen Lives is a movie that depicts a series of tragic events that occurred 50 years earlier when a good family man named Matthew Wakefield played by Josh Lucas, who is struggling to find work and keep his three young sons together as a family, makes a critical mistake and leaves one of his sons alone in the car for just a few minutes one evening. When Matthew returns to his car, his son is gone. Frantically he goes to the local sheriff for assistance but due to Matthew Wakefield's impropriety with a married woman on the evening his son went missing, and his son being mentally challenged, the sheriff is not very sympathetic nor interested in determining what happened to this young boy. It is a fact that back in the first half of the last century child abductions were not intelligently nor systematically investigated or documented to assess what we now know was the work and existence of serial killers. The movie smartly flips back and forth between the fifty year span of the two missing boys initial disappearances. Matthew Wakefield is seen searching for his lost son in the 1950's, and then the scene switches to the current period where detective Tom Adkins Sr is seen searching endlessly for clues into the disappearance of his young and innocent son. The movie provides us with comparisons between the two crimes. Mr. Wakefields lost son disappeared while he was left sleeping in their car, and then the director smartly takes us to current events and the scene flips to a period when an off duty detective named Tom Adkins Sr. played superbly by Jon Hamm takes his young son out to the local carnival for the afternoon and while sitting having some lunch in a trailer type diner he leaves his son alone for just 2 minutes so that he can use the diners rest room. When Detecive Adkins returns to his table his son has completely vanished with no clues, no witnesses, and most importantly, no son. The message I absorbed from these two tragic events is that child abductions have been occurring by serial killers who if not yet been arrested and that they will continue with their evil crimes if not caught. The outcome of these two tragic events that span 50 years is that families never recover and typically ones own guilt overpowers all other emotions as these crimes of opportunity could have been easily prevented. We as good parents have a certain level of trust and security in our own communities but unfortunately these two fathers were not attentive parents on just a single occasion. As a result of the fathers letting their guard down on just a single occasion they become victims and it causes a series of events that affect their own lives as well as the lives of their their extended families who also fall into despair, wondering and praying for their young angels to return home. Truth is however, that thousands of innocent children who are abducted are never found.We have recently learned of a few happy endings such as with the two unrelated discoveries of two missing children whose names are Jaycee Dugard and Shawn Hornbeck who were kidnapped and kept in captivity for years before they were eventually found and returned to their families, albeit many years later with their innocence tarnished forever. Stolen Lives is a movie I recommend to all families as long as their age is over 16. Whether you are married, single, have children, plan to have children in the future, or you are a babysitter minding your siblings, or minding a neighbor's children, please watch this movie. It will certainly hone your sense of responsibility and impress upon all of us how easily a brief lapse in judgement, or a misguided level of trust in humanity needs to be balanced with reality and a higher level of protection for our most blessed gift, our children. Serial killers exist more than we are prepared to comprehend and they prey on the weak and unassuming. This is a great movie with a great cast and the director laid out the movie and series of tragic events over 50 years superbly. Lets always keep our guard up and our children safe from these evil predators.

Do yourself a favor...watch this movie! Josh Lucas, John Hamm, and James Van Byke all give wonderfully superb performances in this dual plot story. The story of 2 fathers in different eras with the same issue, searching for his missing son is woven to perfection. An extremely pressing and reoccurring theme set the base for a beautifully sad story that occurs so often in so many places. The scripting was wonderful and the settings are so natural and not overpowering as many Hollywood films are. I'd kept this on my netflix queue for so long, I started to watch it three times before I fully committed. I was sorry I'd postponed it so long. Such a beautiful film with stellar performances. Watch watch!

Man, movies like this are almost a shame. Except for two things, Stolen is a well crafted journey into the most horrible thing that can happen to any parent and how life tries to go on afterward. Take any moment of this film not affected by those two previously mentioned things and you'd be impressed with the acting, direction and the writing. But those two things just cripple the whole narrative and leaves it limping like an Olympic sprinter who just pulled his hamstring. What makes it so bad is that the problems with those two things are so screamingly obvious, it's impossible to understand how no one involved with this production didn't see and recognize what needed to be fixed. Granted, fixing those two things would have likely required some significant changes to the rest of Stolen which is otherwise perfectly okay as it is. The difference between good and great, however, is often the willingness to do that. To not ignore or brush aside a weakness in a script because it's too fundamental to the story to alter without altering everything else. If those two flaws had been addressed, this would have been a different motion picture. It also would have been a lot better.Tom Adkins (Jon Hamm) is a police detective in 2008 still haunted by the disappearance of his son 8 years ago when the two of them stopped at a roadside diner on the 4th of July. When a small corpse is uncovered at a construction site, Tom thinks the worst but it turns out to be the body of a boy who died 50 years before his son. As Tom investigates in his time, we flash back 50 years to Matthew Wakefield (Josh Lucas) and his youngest son, John (Jimmy Bennett). With his wife a suicide and his other two boys taken in by his sister-in-law, Matt and the mentally-challenged John hit the road in a desperate search for work. As their tale cruises toward John's inevitable death, Tom is driven to solve that crime as a substitute for his missing child. And as you can probably guess, Tom discovers that the two are connected.Let me state that I quite liked watching Stolen for a long way through. No one can brood on screen like Jon Hamm and the way he keeps the awful pain of Tom's lost son an inch under his skin at every moment is almost mesmerizing. Matthew and John being tossed about by fate like bits of flotsam in a storm is also compelling, even though you know how it's going to end. Director Anders Anderson uses some amazing transitions to take us between the ages and both Jessica Chastain and Morena Baccarin shine in their roles. If you've never seen either woman before, you end the film wanting to see a lot more of both. I would still call this a good movie.But…there are those two things. Others may not mind then and perhaps I'm being too finicky, but they're such glaring narrative mistakes that I cannot overlook them. One if that Tom has a suspect in his son's abduction. The other is the nature of the connection between the two missing/dead boys.First, the suspect. He's a character who, when he enters the story, is in prison for "similar crimes" to the disappearance of Tom's son. Any viewer will therefore naturally assume he's guilty, which could have been the basis of a great twist but isn't. So, the audience starts out knowing who killed Tom's son and when it becomes clear that killing is linked with the dead boy from 1958, the audience also immediately knows who's responsible for that death. Stolen is a mystery that spoils its own mystery and doesn't seem to realize it. Another problem with the suspect is that he's already behind bars, which really throws a monkey wrench in trying to create any tension or drama around him. There's a reference to his conviction being overturned, but if that happened Tom would instantly be on the guy like white on rice. The suspect being in prison is what protects him, so the idea he might get out is actually a good thing if you're rooting for Tom. Furthermore, there's a major difference emotionally and psychologically from having a missing child and suspecting a specific person has killed your child. The latter is what's going on in this movie but Tom and his wife (Rhona Mitra) act like they're living through the former. For pity's sake, Tom's wife never even mentions or refers to the guy in prison and it's beyond belief that Tom hasn't shared his suspicions with her.And then there's the connection between the two killings. Yes, the same person did both. What's wrong is that you could have taken any of the characters from 1958, made them the killer and it would have made as much sense as who actually did it. There's no rhyme, reason or logic to why that character did it instead of someone else and there's no justification, explanation or rationale for why that character being the killer is significant or meaningful. When the moment of revelation comes, the folks who made Stolen treat it like a mindblowing event. All it truly merits, though, is a shrug of the shoulders and a "So what?"Despite those two things, I'd still recommend people watch this film, which should say all that needs to be said about how well done everything else is in Stolen. I can't help but think, though, about how much better that different movie would have been.

I have to admit that I have never watched Mad Men, so Jon Hamm is, in a sense, new to me. I am sure I have seen him in other shows, but I do not recall any at the moment.He plays Detective Tom Adkins, who is looking for his son, who disappeared eight years earlier.Simultaneously, we see the story of Matthew Wakefield (Josh Lucas), who is trying to find work to help his three children after his wife dies. His son disappears while he is having a hot time with another man's wife (Morena Baccarin).There are similarities between the two disappearances. Akins is determined to find out what happened to Wakefield's son, and that leads him to a creepy James Van Der Beek.But, he must decide if he will let his life be ruined searching, or if he will embrace his wife and move on.I enjoyed seeing Rhona Mitra (Passion of the Priest, Hollow Man, and The Life of David Gale) as Tom's wife. She always brings an energy to her roles that make them enjoyable.