Amber Alert should have been called Follow That Car!: The Movie. This film faithfully recreates the experience of riding in the backseat of a car all day long while the driver and the person in the passenger seat bicker incessantly, and it’s guaranteed to make you feel like you’d rather jump out of a moving vehicle and take your chances with the pavement (which is certainly less thick and dull than this screenplay).
An opening caption informs us that “Nathan Riley [Chris Hill] and Samantha Green [played by actress Summer Bellessa as a sexy fucking nerdy bitch] were filming an audition video for a popular TV reality show” when they decided to follow around a car described in an amber alert.
The next day, the Phoenix PD “logged the following raw footage as crime scene evidence.” All of it; that is to say, the entire 80 minutes shot by Sam’s younger brother Caleb (Caleb Thompson), even the parts where no crime is being committed and Nate and Sam are just acting like a couple of fucking idiots (e.g., “see[ing] how much fun we can have and how long we can go without spending one dollar.” Incidentally, that sentence — minus the “fun” part — also describes the budget for this movie). Somehow I don’t think that the trio stopping for food was all that crucial to the investigation, but then I’m no detective.
One of the things I liked about Extraction was a car chase that was the next best thing to actually being in the vehicle driven by the hero, but that was a high-speed chase, and it was a set piece, not the whole fucking movie.
Amber Alert’s ride is the kind that leads you to repeatedly wonder aloud, ‘are we there yet?’ — especially as Sam becomes the Backseat Driver from Hell (never mind that she’s occupying the passenger seat; the backseat is Caleb’s domain, and since he’s filming the events, that means we’re stuck for most of the movie with a view of the backs of Nate’s and Sam’s heads, Nate’s car’s dashboard, and whatever we can make out through the windshield).
Sam’s delivery ranges from strident to hysterical, and her dialogue is so corny I’m amazed it doesn’t include the phrase ‘won’t somebody please think of the children!’ or a variation thereof.
When they’re not following “a gray Honda,” our fearless threesome drive directionlessly (much like the film itself), trying to pick up a signal from a microphone that Sam planted in the backseat of the amber alert car during what we might as well call a ‘pit stop.’
This mic is so sensitive that not only can we “listen to what’s going on in there,” but we can even hear the keypad tones as the villain dials a number from his cell/carphone — or, who knows, maybe it’s just a very loud keypad.
All things considered, the only evidence to be found in this footage is that of the Phoenix Police Department’s lagging response time, the only crime is wasting the viewer’s precious time, and the only victim is poor Audience Surrogate Caleb, caught between Sam’s cocksure nagging and Nate’s whiny Devil’s Advocate routine; by the time the latter declares “I don’t give a shit about that little girl,” he had nothing on me — I’d already undergone a figurative colonic, so little shit I had left to give.
90% of Everything is Crap 