Rated: PG | Running Time: 92 Minutes
From: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Available on DVD and Digital: January 10, 2017
Get it via : Amazon
Ahh, nothing better than a family-friendly movie about the quest to discover a buried treasure. Okay, there might be better, but while your young girls might be enjoying “Apple of My Eye,” this one, “Lost & Found,” is for the boys, or adventurous girls.
Let’s get to the story…
To start we find out that there was this dude who developed an island oasis. Hooray. He disappears one day at sea. Boo. He supposedly left a treasure on the island. Hooray. No one has been able to find it, and people have even died looking for it. Boo. Now a rich developer has bought the island and is ruining its tiny, island charm. Double-boo.
Enter Andy.
Andy (Justin Kelly) is a high school kid who is lost. He’s a swimmer, loses a swim meet, and along with it a college scholarship. What better thing to do next than to try and steal some beer from the corner store, and hopefully get the hot girl, Claire (Celeste Desjardins).
Unfortunately for Andy he’s got crappy friends, gets caught, and rather than jail his parents send him to the island to hang out with his previously unknown Uncle Trent (Jason Patric). Oh, and along the way let’s send the younger brother, Mark (Benjamin Stockham).
The boys soon find out about their Grandpa Walton and the treasure, and as boys will be boys, it’s time for a treasure hunt! There are a few problems, though. First off Claire shows up. It turns out it is her dad that is buying the island, and it also turns out that her dad is a, well, if this wasn’t a family movie I would call him something different, but let’s just say John Broman (Cary Elwes) is a jerk. Worse than that, he’s a ruthless jerk, and nothing will stand in his way of using the boys to find the treasure.
And so the race is on to find the treasure. Along the way family secrets come out, the boys are creative and work together, Claire even helps, and the ending is kind of obvious.
I will say that this movie has flaws, but the general niceness of it all, and the boys working their way through the clues, was kind of fun. Probably the thing that did bother me the most about the movie was the foreshadowing and telegraphing of plot points and “surprises” that didn’t end up being surprises. I won’t ruin most of them, but really, why is Claire wearing this giant key around her neck (It’s easy to figure out), and the “I can hold my breath” line early in the movie. The other thing is just how stupid Dad Broman is.
“Lost & Found” doesn’t really break any new ground in the “searching for a buried treasure” genre, and I did find it a little odd that, with most of the movie being family friendly, there were two scenes that were actually kind of violent and even shocked me. It really pushed the PG rating to the limit in my mind.
I’ll just wrap this up and give “Lost & Found” 2 1/2 stars. I guess I wanted more adventure, the violent moments didn’t need to be that out front for a PG movie, and there were just too many plot points given away with obvious foreshadowing for my liking.
I generally don’t recommend deleted scenes with the extras on a DVD, but there were a couple of scenes, one being where Claire learns the truth about her dad, and the other when Claire showed the truth about her dad to Trent, that I really thought should have been left in the movie. With that, spend the extra few minutes checking them out.
That’s it for this one! L8R!!