By Chris Luckett
4 stars out of 5
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| Image property of Warner Bros. |
There is a great movie hidden in Prisoners.
Unfortunately, it’s smothered by an overabundance of red herrings and a running
time nearly 45 minutes too long.
The cast boasts four Oscar nominees, one
Oscar winner, one Golden Globe nominee, and an actor who co-starred in two Best
Picture nominees. The movie certainly can’t be accused of lousy casting. With
the pedigree onscreen in Prisoners,
hardly a scene fails to grip. Sadly, the movie also makes a great example of
“too much of a good thing.”
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| Image property of Warner Bros. |
Maria Bello and Hugh Jackman play Grace and
Keller, the parents of a Pennsylvanian family who are spending this particular
Thanksgiving evening with their friends (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and
children. The evening takes a sudden and dark turn when the youngest daughters
of both families go missing while walking outside.
Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal, in one of
his most layered performances) takes on the case to locate the missing
daughters and spends the first third of the movie investigating a creepy man in
an RV (Paul Dano) who had been lurking in the neighbourhood around the time of
the abduction.
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| Image property of Warner Bros. |
The movie really starts moving when Keller,
irate at the lack of progress in locating his daughter, takes a pivotal action
in vigilante justice that dims Prisoners
even darker. (If neither Jackman nor Gyllenhaal receive an Oscar nomination,
it’ll be very surprising.) The movie gets continuously darker as it marches to
its final frames, at which point the bleakness completely swallows the movie up,
leaving just the closing credits.
Ultimately, what starts as a tense ride to the climax slows to a crawl as Prisoners
takes countless dead-end turns following red herrings and keeps continuing past
the natural end points of the movie. It’s a real shame, because with a few
thorough edits, Prisoners could have
been one of the best movies of the year.
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