The critics haven't picked up on the fact that it's a quest romance, but the moviemakers certainly knew: the alien-run airline Moore's son flew on is called QuestAir. Which makes it surprising as well as a shame that they don't do more with the romance narrative. Even in terms of excitement the movie would be better if it broke the conflict down into separate battles that brought out distinct aspects of maternal love in scenes of mounting tension (and perhaps offered evidence of its darker forms for contrast, e.g., covering up a son's crime, as Edith Evans does so sensationally in The Last Days of Dolwyn (1949), flooding an entire village to hide the evidence). Anything to vary this simplest of romances a little and give it some shape. (If the narrative were worked out more thoroughly you'd pay less attention to such idiotic details as the fact that aliens who can erase human memories are still subject to bankruptcy proceedings.) But the movie puts too much emphasis on the mere plot secret that extra-terrestrials are behind it all, on the shocks (people sucked instantaneously off the face of the planet), and on Moore at her least multifarious. The only time she seems like a real person is when her character pretends to be someone else.

Which isn't to say Moore sits down on the job, but rushing about doesn't do any more for her in The Forgotten than it did in Magnolia. The National Security Administration is in league with the kidnaping aliens, and a suspicious New York cop is on the trail of the jurisdiction-jumping NSA, so, after Moore has run from her husband and her shrink who want to institutionalize her, she runs from the NSA officials and from the cops. And runs and runs. (That's really her running, too.) Finally, when she's face to face with the chief alien, possessor of horrifying supernatural powers, she tries to run from him. This showdown is the moment to reveal the full majesty of her maternal instincts, but why dramatize your premise when you can blow the windows out of an abandoned warehouse instead? The Forgotten is bad news, but the good news is that until I saw Laws of Attraction I wouldn't have thought they were wasting Moore as much as they are. Now I know.

For the record, Joseph Ruben has directed some wonderfully entertaining movies, including Dreamscape (1984), starring Dennis Quaid; The Stepfather (1987), the most characterful of serial-killer movies, with a brilliant Terry O'Quinn as the wily, straining-to-be-normal psycho; True Believer (1989), starring James Woods and Robert Downey, Jr. in the jauntiest of uncovering-a-coverup movies; and Return to Paradise (1998), an earnest romance in which Anne Heche deceptively seduces Vince Vaughn into doing the right thing in an international crisis. (She's a temptress who turns out to be the damsel in distress--she uses foul means to get the reluctant knight to do fair work.) Return to Paradise is underpopulated by comparison to the Humphrey Bogart pictures it resembles, Casablanca (1942) and To Have and Have Not (1944), but it has electric conversational shifts and the stars' performances are, if less iconic, more believably urgent than in those old standards.