Continuing my efforts to clean out the DVR, I followed up A Teacher’s Obsession by watching 16 and Missing.  16 and Missing originally aired on the Lifetime network on October 24th.  On that particularly Saturday, I was haunting a Halloween party (booooo!), so I set the DVR to record it.

In many ways, 16 and Missing is a quintessential Lifetime film.  It’s about a rebellious teenage girl who has a loving (and underappreciated) mother and a stepfather who is trying way too hard to serve as a replacement patriarchal figure.  It also features an initially charming man who later turns out to be a complete psycho.  There’s a lot of driving, an important life lesson, and a lot of gunplay.  At the end of the movie, the mother is proven right and everyone hugs and strangely enough, nobody seems to be all that traumatized by all of the truly terrible things that have just happened to them.  None of that, by the way, is meant to be a criticism.  Lifetime movies are a genre all their own and part of the fun comes from their familiarity.

16 and Missing also deals with a common Lifetime movie theme — i.e., that the internet is an evil place that exists only to lead teenage girls astray.  In this case, spoiled rotten Abbey (Lizze Broadway) has been using her social media accounts to carry on a two-year, online affair Gavin (Mark Hupka), who claims to be a 23 year-old cop.  After Abbey has a fight with her mother, former FBI agent Julia (Ashley Scott), Abbey decides to run away from home.  She sneaks out of the house, gets in her car, and drives off to Arizona…

And what immediately bothered me was the fact that Abbey didn’t pack anything before she ran way.  Admittedly, this probably says more about me than the movie.  I’m just saying that if I had ever run away from home and headed for a different state, I would have brought along a change of clothes.

But anyway, Abbey meets up with Gavin and is shocked to discover that Gavin is a little bit older than 23.  And he might not be a cop.  And his name might actually be Wesley.  And, as soon as she shows up, Gavin/Wesley immediately starts pressuring her to have sex…

Okay, so it’s pretty obvious that Gavin/Wesley wasn’t everything that he said he was and, to the film’s credit, Abbey quickly figures this out.  As opposed to a lot of similar Lifetime films (in which the teenage girl is always presented as being far too naive to be believable), 16 and Missing makes it clear that Abbey is a girl who made an impulsive mistake, who understands that she made an impulsive mistake, but who has now found herself trapped by that impulsive mistake.

However, Abbey and Wes-Gavin do have one thing in common.  They both lost their fathers in the most violent and disturbing ways possible.  Gavin’s father was a cop and Gavin claims that he was shot in the head by his partner.  Abbey’s father was abducted and murdered while a 6 year-old Abbey helplessly watched.  Could the two events be connected?  It wouldn’t be a Lifetime film if they weren’t.

But don’t worry!  After breaking into her daughter’s social media accounts, Julia is on the road to Arizona and she’s got a gun…

Anyway, 16 and Missing was an entertaining Lifetime film.  If you’re into Lifetime films, especially ones that present the internet as being the root of all evil, you should enjoy this one.  And if you’re not into Lifetime movies, you probably wouldn’t be watching in the first place.