“Stolen Girl” (2025) is no “Not Without My Daughter” (1991), and if it is based on a true story, there are definitely huge swaths of the story missing. Our favorite Death Dealer gets an unconvincing “Julia Roberts playing Erin Brockovich” makeover to play Mara Dunning. When her ex, Karim (Arvin Kananian), a doctor, takes their four-year-old daughter, Amina (Rosa & Valeria Di Cosimo), to another country. After exhausting all the appropriate legal avenues, she accepts a job from Mitchell Robeson (Scott Eastwood), who grabs kids and returns them to their parents, because he promises to help her find Amina, but when she gets closer to her goal, he seems to be holding back details about his business. What is going on? It does not matter. Skip it in the theaters and maybe even streaming.
“Stolen Girl” is not a good movie for many reasons. Even though the movie keeps its audience apprised of where the scene is located and how much time has passed since mother and daughter separated, no time seems to have passed. The characters are ill-defined and more like sketches than actual people. Mara and her ill dad, Joe (Matt Craven), live together in a trailer, and they are supposed to be close, but he exists to admire her and emotionally manipulate the audience as the personification of a countdown. If you are a fan of Beckinsale, you are just waiting until she gets to kick ass.
Well, “Stolen Girl” does not even do that well. The logistics of each operation seems muddled and amateurish. A quick montage fails to establish that they become a solid team. There needed to be at least one well executed grab. The movie does not convey clearly what is supposed to happen versus when an operation goes to crap. It is hard to believe that ex-Marine Mitchell and his right-hand man, Carl (Jordan Duvigneau), a guy whose mom did not love him enough, are competent since there is not one moment when something does not go off without a hitch. Also why is Carl working for Mitchell instead of a partner? Even though Mitchell introduces Mara to Carl, they feel like more of a team than Carl and Mitchell. Mara is supposed to make everything go smoothly, but she starts shooting erratically and even kills a few people accidentally. When a parent is one of the people hit, it never occurs to the writers Kas Graham and Rebecca Pollock that the kid may no longer trust Mara and start resisting even if the parent was problematic. It is a movie without consequences, which results in soon losing interest in the story long before it ends.
“Stolen Girl” brings up the ethical dilemma of whether it is moral to charge a parent to return their child or how to know if they are working for a decent parent. They could be the bad guys even though they seem good. There is also the tension that Mitchell is obviously hiding important details about this business from Carl and Mara. Does it matter? Not particularly. All these scenes feel superficial and verge on incoherent. When Lewis (Robert Farrior) is introduced as the mover and shaker behind the operation, he does not feel like a credible threat or protector and is forgettable. He is the money bags that fundsMitchell’s private cases.
The relationship between Mitchell and Mara feels obligatory like a box to check, and Beckinsale and Eastwood do not even have a single match’s worth of fire between them. There are potatoes with more battery power. To be fair, almost no one has chemistry with each other. Most of the acting is wooden, and Eastwood sounds like a NPC. Beckinsale is a good actor, but you would not know it if you just saw her in “Stolen Girl.” She has range from her film debut in “Much Ado About Nothing” (1993)—that is the Kenneth Branagh, Denzel Washington, Emma Thompson and Keanu Reeves version, to artsy fartsy films like “Laurel Canyon” (2002) and “The Aviator” (2004) to her iconic role as Selene, a vampire, in the uneven “Underworld” franchise. Rumor is that she is also good at comedy. The styling is off. Her hair and makeup generally look the same regardless of the scene or situation. Some people cannot play poor because Beckinsale is too innately glam. She never seems convincingly working class, and the writers have no idea what to do with the character. Is this a story where an ordinary woman turns badass international secret agent like “Alias” or “La Femme Nikita” (1990)? The fight choreography is too slow to work.
Once more women are added to the cast, “Stolen Girl” begins to pick up some steam. When the trio finally lands in the country where Amina is, all the women actors are more innately interesting, but it is too little, too late. Their work is better than anything that happened before. Nowar Yusuf stands out as Dasia, a woman who wants to help but is also concerned for her own safety. Yusuf grounds the movie. There is also a brief scene in a café with an older woman who only speaks one English line, and when her scene ended, I was like “Nooooooo, don’t go!”
Director James Kent and/or his editor Tommy Aagaard make baffling choices. For example, in one scene, a car’s right rear wheel gets a close up. Does it matter? Nope. Kent has zero clue how to film Beckinsale when she is doing the go-to mom wailing moves, and the shot looks like the cameraman tripped. If it was a deliberate choice, it was a mistake. Also, he makes the revolutionary choice of choosing a yellowish-brown palette when shooting scenes that are supposed to be occurring in Mexico or the Middle East. Cue Miranda Priestley saying, “Revolutionary.”
“Stolen Girl” is most aggravating because it feels like a waste of time when it reveals the story behind the abduction. It is like the writers wanted to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to Karim. Mara may be the bad parent, but they could not figure out a way to convincingly land that idea and make audiences root for Mara. In one bus scene, Beckinsale may offer a clue when she grabs her daughter’s arm too hard and starts shouting. Also alternatively, if you are inclined to read between the lines, the daughter seemed to be like, “Girl, you’re poor. Ew.” If the writers had fully embraced skewering the trope of a mom rescuing a child from a bad dad, this movie could have been fun.
“Stolen Girl” is time that I will never get back. It is not the worst movie because then it would at least be fun to skewer. It is just sad because Beckinsale deserves better. The real question is whether this movie is just a mistake or a sign of things to come with no more great movies to look forward to. I hope not. I’m still rooting for her to get better material and will be sat for her next movie.
