PRISONERS – The Review

If crime drama is your thing, it really doesn’t get much better than PRISONERS. Hugh Jackman, in a star performance, plays Keller Dover, a blue-collar family man who is facing every parent’s worst nightmare. His six-year-old daughter, Anna, is missing, together with her young friend Joy, and as minutes turn to hours, panic sets in. The only lead is a dilapidated RV that had earlier been parked on their street. Heading the investigation, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) arrests its driver, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), but a lack of evidence forces the only suspect’s release. Knowing his child’s life is at stake, the frantic Dover decides he has no choice but to take matters into his own hands…..Bronson style! He abducts Alex, drags him to his abandoned childhood home, ties him to a sink, and rearranges his face. And that’s just in the film’s first 30 minutes! PRISONERS goes on to serve up two more intense hours of twists and turns, red herrings, and torture.

PRISONERS is A-grade stuff: well-plotted and unpredictable from start to finish and French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve directs with an appropriately slow and methodical style. The film runs over 2 ½ hours but it’s edge-of-your-seat entertainment, engrossing with a chilly-winter feel. Some third-act twists notwithstanding, Villeneuve lets tension build slowly and naturally, with the requisite shocks and violence surfacing only when they need to. The sure-to-be-controversial torture in the film is grim indeed. Keller constructs a ‘scalding shower box of death’ that would make Jigsaw proud and seems to enjoy putting it to use. If the waterboarding in ZERO DARK THIRTY made you squirm, you may want to steer clear of PRISONERS. Aaron Guzikowski’s screenplay spends some time focusing on how the two sets of parents deal differently with the crisis as the clock ticks and hope fades (Keller’s wife is played by Maria Bello and the other child’s parents by Terrence Howard and an underused Viola Davis). But it’s mostly the Hugh and Jake show and Jackman is especially good, creating a character both fearsome and pathetic. Jake Gyklenhall’s soft-spoken calmness is the movie’s backbone, and as Loki’s investigation twists and deepens, the character enters hopelessly blurred moral territory, where doing the right thing starts to look all wrong (and vice versa). The rub, though, is that the film’s mysteries come to a head in a conventional puzzle-solving gunpoint finale that spells everything out and can’t help but feel a bit anticlimactic, though not enough that it upends all the fine work that went before it. Ultimately, PRISONERS is an interesting story told well and there’s little doubt that the movie’s conclusion is destined to leave viewers thinking and talking long after the end credits have rolled.

4 1/2 of 5 Stars