Last Seen Alive is an effective-enough little mid-tier thriller that I figured would be worse than it is. So… it’s a pleasant surprise? Maybe that’s too much praise… it’s a pleasant-enough surprise? That’s more like it.

Gerard Butler plays a frantic husband who has lost his wife (Jamie Alexander) at a gas station. He tries to work with the suspicious cops but winds up going vigilante on a bunch of meth-head asses.

This movie doesn’t do anything new, but what it does works reasonably well. I found the suspense reasonably well done, if a little over-done and a little routine.

For a Liam Neeson-like mid-tier action movie that hired Gerard Butler instead, it’s better than most of the recent Neeson movies. So it’s got that to its credit. Butler does a good enough job being this frantic out-of-his-element baddie. Jamie Alexander is wasted on a weekend where I also saw her underused in Thor: Love and Thunder.

I kept waiting for the shoe to drop, the twist to twist, or the surprise to jump out of the cake… but the screenplay has very little on its mind. This is pretty straight-forward… though I did find the ending a little scattershot and lackluster. But that’s what you get for trying to apply logic to a man vs. the meth lab movie.

Not a bad rental. I’ve surely seen worse movies in this modern mid-tier action thriller genre. I was reasonably entertained and found it reasonably suspenseful, without going overboard on the action heroics. Not bad.

Score: 78