Gerard Butler's Action Thriller That's a 'Taken' Replacement Is Leaving Netflix Very Soon

A man and his wife are on a long car trip and stop to get gas, at which point the wife gets out of the car and is never seen again. That’s the setup for Gerard Butler’s action movie Last Seen Alive, which is about to leave Netflix on October 1, and it’s also the setup for the Dutch film The Vanishing, one of the greatest and most horrifying thrillers ever made. There’s no official connection between the two movies beyond that, but there is something cathartic to Last Seen Alive that fans — if you want to be called a “fan” of something so unsettling — of The Vanishing can appreciate, just like how anyone who watches Last Seen Alive might be interested in The Vanishing’s more thoughtful and haunting take on the concept.

Despite the thematic connection to the 96%-rated The Vanishing, though, Last Seen Alive only holds a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes and is in the bottom-five of Gerard Butler’s career. But the movie came out in 2022 and only has a handful of critic reviews, so there’s a chance it simply flew under the radar and has yet to find its own appreciators. With Last Seen Alive leaving Netflix soon, do you want to miss out on seeing it? Either way, you should watch The Vanishing (which is on VOD services on The Criterion Channel) because it’s genuinely incredible.

Is There a Connection Between ‘Last Seen Alive’ and ‘The Vanishing’?

Gene Bervoets and Johanna Ter Steege looking at each other while sitting under a tree in The Vanishing

Again, no, but Vanishing viewers might wish their movie was a little more like the trashier Gerard Butler one. Last Seen Alive follows Butler’s character as he goes on a mission for vengeance to find his wife and figure out what happened to her after she disappears at a gas station, all while blowing things up and shooting people along the way — you know, like Gerard Butler does in a Gerard Butler movie. The Vanishing, meanwhile, follows Belgian actor Gene Bervoets as he becomes obsessed with the same mission, finding his wife who disappeared at a gas station, and becomes more and more deranged as the years go by without a single clue turning up.

Watching the ending of The Vanishing is one of the joys of the film (to the extent that something so awful can be a joy), but it’s fairly obvious going in that there’s not going to be a happy ending for the husband and wife. By contrast, Last Seen Alive couldn’t possibly end in any way other than by having Butler and his wife (played by Jaimie Alexander from the Thor movies) be reunited and by having their love for each other be reaffirmed. After The Vanishing, it might a nice palate cleanser to see a movie where the villain burns to death in an explosion.

Weirdly, Gerard Butler was also in a completely unrelated movie called The Vanishing from 2018 (it’s about lighthouse keepers), and there was an actual English remake of The Vanishing in 1993 by the same director as the Dutch original (George Sluizer). It starred Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, and it was also a more crowd-pleasing take on the material than the original film. It was also roundly rejected by critics, proving that people prefer sad endings in their kidnapping movies.