At the start of the movie, Seattle detective Petrocelli is impatient as he investigates a murder. The cop who figures out when the murder took place wants him to be patient with her.
Six years later, Colleen is missing. Her husband John David Finn is a suspect in what may be a murder. Over the past six years, Petrocelli has investigated several murders of women who looked like Colleen and had a similar history. Furthermore, each woman was murdered the same way--and each victim had no fingerprints or a recognizable face after the murderer finished with her. This would make her hard to identify.
As we learn in flashbacks, Colleen ran away from home and ended up at the Seattle airport, where John worked as a security guard. He was charming and ended up romancing her. His overprotective mother did not approve.
Detective Ronnie McAdams is investigating Colleen's disappearance, but because of the connection to John, she ends up having to work with Petrocelli, who doesn't get along well with others. Ronnie has Christy, a rebellious teenage daughter of her own, to deal with. Christy's boyfriend Trey will potentially be trouble.
Over the six years, John's mother Frances, a veteran Seattle Police Department employee, has felt Petrocelli was harassing her son. If he was guilty, though, it's a good thing John had someone on the inside to cover up anything that might incriminate him. And she certainly knows her rights and takes full advantage of them. She has a disabled brother Gerry who depends on her a lot. Colleen and John also have a baby.
This was interesting, partly because Ronnie and Christy had their own story line. I would watch a TV series starring those characters and Petrocelli as Ronnie's unlikely partner. But I don't think this was a pilot.
There may be a logical explanation for what happened to Colleen and the other women. We're never quite sure who did it until the end. But the actors playing both John and his overprotective mother do quite a good job. John is first charming, then creepy, then overly confident.
An interesting technique with the flashbacks: they look like a signal from a distant analog TV station. But here in the United States, except for low-powered TV, there is no analog signal. The perfect digital signal returns once the flashback is over.
This is pretty good.
