Myriad PicturesReview in a Hurry: Though it's being marketed to horror fans based on a single scene of gory violence, be not fooled: an hour's worth of dull kidnapped-kid drama followed by 30 minutes of ludicrous twists does not a scary good time make. It merely renders the film's title ironic. Also, Simon Baker's a stiff.
The Bigger Picture: Land of the Dead...The Ring Two...and now, Not Forgotten. Time for everyone to realize that when Simon Baker is the male lead in a horror movie, it will most likely be aggressively mediocre. He's not without chops in the romantic comedy department (Something New), but when it comes to portraying someone either scary or haunted, he just looks mildly ill.
Here, he plays a doting father named Jack in a Texas border-town who's married to the sheriff's cousin (Paz Vega), with a cute pre-teen girl bearing the curiously male name of Toby (Chloe Moretz). Dad apparently hasn't instilled the best values in his kid, however, or she might have learned not to steal pyramid-shaped snow-globes from the window sills of scary old Mexican women. Lo and behold, a day later she goes missing.
The plot thickens, but only mildly, when it becomes clear that Jack has been lying about many things in his life, and his past may be coming back to haunt him. Why this leads him to pretend he doesn't speak Spanish, even though he lives on the Mexican border and is married to a Latina, is unclear.
Not Forgotten recalls two recent indie films that you'd be better served to seek out instead. After Dark Films' Borderland, which more deftly segued from kidnap thriller to brutal horror, and the Gael Garcia Bernal-narrated documentary La Santa Muerte, which chronicles an odd subset of Mexican Catholicism in which a female Grim Reaper is worshipped as a saint. Like any misunderstood religious group, the Santa Muerte cult—that in reality is mostly adopted by convicted prisoners—makes an easy target for a lil' religious slander in the name of cheap scares.
Also, if you want us to fear for a character's life, having that same character narrate the whole movie in flashback is a bad idea. Especially when the story features events said person wasn't privy to.
The 180—a Second Opinion: That one gory scene we mentioned above? It does pack a punch. Not remotely enough to save the movie, but enough to keep us from giving it an F.