Desperate Hours: An Amber Alert

Personally, I really liked this movie. Others didn't, but we all have our different tastes. I found it suspenseful and I was drawn into the plight of the two teenage girls. The story is about them being kidnapped and the efforts of their families and the police to find them. There really wasn't much about the police work. As one of the moms described it, the basic attitude of the police was "we've done the paperwork, now we wait."

The kidnapper was played by Tom Berenger. He actually accomplished the difficult task of making me a little bit sympathetic to his character. As he put it, he never wanted to kidnap anyone - he just wanted to steal a car and he ended up with the girls. But he never hurt them, and never really touched them aside from tying and taping them. I'm not saying he was a good guy - just a guy who got in over his head and in the end paid a very high price for it.

My biggest criticism of this is that it focuses too much on some family melodrama (even including the family of the police chief heading the search) which didn't really add anything important to the story and was just at the expense of following the plight of the girls. But basically this worked pretty well, I thought.

Larsan (Tom Berenger) is a dangerous armed drifter. He gets out of prison and confronts his ex-wife looking for his daughter Kaylee. The car breaks down. He carjacks 18 year old Debra (Genevieve Buechner) leaving her friend Sandy (Jessica Parker Kennedy) behind. 17 year old Katie (Britt McKillip) storms out of home with boyfriend Pete. Larsan kidnaps Katie. Pete is able to call the cops. Chief Geiger (Torri Higginson) activates the Amber Alert system.

Tom Berenger is a veteran actor, and he's able to give a threatening performance despite some cheesy talking-to-himself. Britt McKillip shows some acting skills. But mostly both girls cried a lot.... I mean a whole lot. The whole movie is either an advertisement for the Amber Alert, or a really lazy writing assignment for a film school. There really isn't much here. The only drama comes from the girls and Tom Berenger. Nothing else is really that interesting. Don't expect anything more than the simplest TV movie-of-the-week.

terrible editing! you can see numerous scenes where the editing is poorly done and the actor they used as the kidnapper is awful.

there's no way that you should seriously watch this movie unless you have nothing else to do or you are being forced to watch it as a sign of torture.

It's just not a very good movie at all. poor writing and poor film editing really make this a sub par quality movie.

Just avoid the pain of having to sit through this movie!

perhaps if they were to replace the actor with someone who actually knows how to act and improve the editing quality of this film it might be worth watching on TV. don't buy the DVD as you are wasting your money.

On Lifetime the movie is called "Desperate Hours". I wish they wouldn't do this, it's very confusing.I notice that a lot of movies do this. So when looking for info, you might have to just search for info on the character themselves., which sometimes takes extra time,but I guess if you really want to know you will take the time.I enjoy Tom Berringer movies every since I saw him in the movie The Substitute where he played a teacher undercover after his girlfriend is assaulted by some gang members. That movie had a very good story line and it was exciting from start to finish. Don't know why he wasn't in any of the sequels.But I really enjoyed this movie.

On Tubi this is titled 'Desperate Hours'.

The camera angles and shots are horrible.

The editing is bad, like 1st semester film student...amateur bad. What's with all the annoying close ups???

There are too many stories going on at once and the writers try to mesh them together but it doesn't work. While a no brainer to follow, it feels messy and every character becomes the main character.

To my understanding, the kidnapper is a seasoned actor though personally, I have never heard of him. In this, he's terrible. None of them are good but I expected more from someone viewers seem to be familiar with. At first glance, I thought he was Eric Roberts and I thought, oh Lord....it's him, hahaha. While he's terrible and the movies he acts in are just as bad, he has become one of my favorite super low budget guilty pleasure movies actors, so I got excited....*shrugs*

This movie is one of those you watch and forget about the next day.

I watched it. The end.