In the pantheon of young 2000s actresses who were a very big deal and then sort of went nowhere, Hayden Panettiere stands out, not because we ask why she didn’t become a bigger deal (like Leighton Meester), but because we know exactly what happened. There was a bout of post-partum depression that caused her to temporarily leave production of the TV show Nashville in 2015, and more recently, Panettiere has spoken candidly about substance abuse issues and her recovery, which now includes her first leading role since the Nashville days.
Panettiere reprised her role as Kirby Reed in Scream VI, but in Amber Alert she stars in a two-hander with Tyler James Williams, which makes Amber Alert her first lead role since Nashville ended in 2016. (It’s her first leading film role since 2016’s Custody, too.) Amber Alert is about a rideshare driver (Williams) and his passenger (Panettiere) who spot a car from an Amber alert and try to keep up with it to save a little girl who has been kidnapped. Does it look good? Not especially. Is it good to see Panettiere back in action as a leading lady? Yes. We stan a comeback queen.
But there is something a little weird about Amber Alert, in that it appears to be a pair of filmmakers getting a mulligan on a previous film of theirs, also called Amber Alert. Back in 2012, director Kerry Bellessa co-wrote a movie with Joshua Oram also called Amber Alert, but it is a found footage film about friends following an Amber alert car. Amber Alert (2012) has a rather dismal 36% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not the end-all, be-all judgment of a film’s quality, but several of the audience reviews specifically mention they made an RT account JUST to give this movie a 1-star rating, which is a level of petty I appreciate.
The new film is updated for the rideshare era, but it is still written by Kerry Bellessa and Joshua Oram, with Bellessa directing once again. So Hayden Panettiere is getting a second shot as a leading lady, and Kerry Bellessa and Joshua Oram are getting a second shot at making their Amber alert thriller, too. Let’s hope the second go-round works out better for everyone.
