TAKE YOUR BEST SHOT: In “Missing,” Ashley Judd plays a mother on the hunt for her son in Italy. (
)
Ashley Judd is one tough-ass mother, and I do mean that literally.
Tonight, the movie star who loves playing against type is playing against most TV stereotypes — especially for women over 30 and most definitely over 40.
On “Missing,” the 43-year-old actress (that’s ancient in dog and TV years!) plays a tough martial-arts ex-spy who manages in maybe 36 hours to travel to Italy and France, give and get many beatdowns, outwit most government agencies, seamlessly break through the French intelligence headquarters in broad daylight, get shot, fall into the Seine, swim to safety while bleeding and clutching a photo of her son — and then get a sponge bath from a rugged Italian ex-lover spy.
Now, that’s what I call a full few days in Europe!
This lotsa-fun new show begins 10 years earlier when Rebecca Winstone (Judd), seemingly just your average hockey mom, is talking to her husband, Paul (Sean Bean, who looks about 700 pounds thinner and 70 years younger than he did on “Game of Thrones”), who is in Vienna with their young son, Michael.
When the kid runs back into the hotel to retrieve his soccer ball — kaboom! — Paul’s car explodes.
Fast forward 10 years and, as hockey mom Rebecca is jogging with now-18-year-old Michael (Nick Eversman), he tells her that the architecture program he’s studying at college is offering him a semester in Italy.
Now, if your husband’s car was blown up in Europe years earlier, chances are good you wouldn’t let your kid go alone, but hey, this is TV. And wouldn’t you know it — within a week or so, Michael goes missing and Rebecca, a lioness when it comes to her son, goes on a tear around Europe to find him. It’s only then that we find out that Rebecca is actually a former CIA agent (one of the best, of course), who now owns a flower shop. (On TV, all former assassins and secret agents retire to benign careers like flowers and catering.)
Turns out that Michael’s been abducted, but he’s almost beside the point — it’s Judd fighting, punching, shooting, swimming, scaling tall buildings, running down runways after planes, that matters.
Can she find her son while all intelligence agencies in the world want to stop her?
And that’s especially true of the CIA, which isn’t happy one of their own (is she really a former agent — or still on the payroll?) has gone (oh no!) rogue. You’d think by now that the CIA would have figured out that every good-looking person who ever works for them eventually goes rogue.
The abduction of Michael includes bad French guys, good French guys, heroin and a heroine. Think “The French Connection” meets “Alias” with a big helping of Taylor Lautner’s “Abduction.”
Besides all that, we get to see lots of European cities — even if some of them aren’t where they say they are.
When you’re kicking butt, does it matter that that isn’t really a street in Rome?