Police detective Tom Adkins Sr. (Jon Hamm) loses his son Tommy at a country fair. Eight years later, a boy's body is dug up by a construction crew but it's not his missing son. His wife Barbara (Rhona Mitra) is breaking down. The body turns out to be 50 years old and Adkins starts investigating. In flashbacks, Matthew Wakefield (Josh Lucas)'s farm is foreclosed and his wife commits suicide. He and his sons Mark, Luke, and mentally handicap John struggle to find their place in the world.

This is filled with some solid actors. The present day story is dull. The investigation is not compelling although the past is better. Josh Lucas delivers an interesting flawed character. His unraveling throughout the movie is intriguing. The old-man makeup is distracting. It would be simpler to use a real elderly man. The eyes always give it away. This movie is a bit of a muddle that works sometimes but doesn't always add up to be good. The twisty multi-suspects do get tiresome. I wouldn't mind a clear story about Matthew struggling to keep his family together.

Stolen is an mystery thriller that stars Josh Lucas and Jon Hamm together with Rhona Mitra,Jimmy Bennett,James Van Der Beek,Marcus Thomas and Jessica Chastain.The story revolves around Detective Tom Adkins, a man haunted relentlessly by the disappearance of his ten-year-old son, Tommy, Jr. It was directed by Anders Anderson.

A small-town policeman works to uncover the truth behind two crimes: the disappearance of his son eight years earlier, and a fifty-year-old homicide of another boy.No leads immediately turn up in that case, but he does receive an early-morning phone call that draws him to the mangled and mutilated remains of a young boy slain 50 years prior. Tom takes on the case in an attempt to find absolution, and a second tale evolves, set 50 before, involving a man named Matthew Wakefield and his son John. The baffling similarities between the Wakefield case and Tommy Jr.'s mysterious fate push Tom to the brink of sanity and ultimately lead him on a collision course with fate. Gradually, one step at a time, Tom stumbles onto the horrifying truth about what happened to his boy. Barely holding onto his sanity and bound by redemption, Adkins unravels the unspeakable truth behind what happened to his son.

Presented in a barrenness, uninspired package, the film takes an interesting premise and turns it into an unforgivably predictable and flimsy genre.Hamm's and Lucas' performances are fine, but first-time director Anderson is heavy-handed and overwrought, portraying emotional turmoil with clichés.Too bad that it is far from being an average film because of it.

This thriller, starring "Mad Men's" John Hamm, while watchable, ultimately fails through implausible plotting and the contrived use of coincidence.

Consider Hamm's anguished cop, who, at a Fourth of July pageant, in the mere minutes it took him to go to and from the toilet in a diner establishment, finds the son who accompanied him has apparently disappeared as if into thin air, never to return. It later transpires that he encounters the perpetrator just outside the diner, so how has he managed to spirit away his son and got back to the pageant in those mere minutes?

Years pass, with Hamm unable to get over his loss and attendant guilt, the emotional distance between him and his wife widening close to separation point, when a child's body is unearthed, bearing similarities to his own child and immediately throwing suspicion on a long-interred suspect. The movie then moves back and forth in time from the present-day to 1958 where we see enacted the story of the disappearance (thankfully, there are no scenes depicting the actual murder of the children) of the first child and the truth is gradually brought to light as the stories converge.

That's quite a lot to bring together in a mere 90 minutes and after all the exposition, the ending is wound up in double quick time, with a too blatant slip by the murderer and too easily obtained subsequent confession. I also thought the 1958 story was more involving, if more implausible than the present-day one, contriving a "Postman Always Rings Twice" dalliance between the father and a local femme-fatale, complete with jealous husband, unbalancing the narrative, although the transitions between the two time-frames were cleverly done, with dissolves on the shared crime-scene exhibits.

The acting was okay, Hamm jutting his jaw and running his hand through his hair in familiar angst-ridden fashion, although I thought the better acting was done by Josh Lucas as his 1950's counterpart, conveying just the right composite of Henry Fonda crossed with James Stewart as the drifter at the mercy of fate, while Morena Baccarin and James Van der Beek playing respectively the slack wife and the murderer made strong, if brief impressions too.

In the end, this was a fairly routine thriller, lacking somewhat in tension, characterisation and credibility, with more of the aspects of a TV movie than Hollywood feature. I don't think I'd pay to watch it, seeing it on the small-screen seemed about right.