It stars Hugh Jackman as religious survivalist Keller Dover. One afternoon the Dover family visits their neighbors, the Birchs, for a quiet Thanksgiving dinner. Director Denis Villeneuve takes his time laboriously underlining just how normal a day this is while a dank, dirty RV circles the neighborhood. Eventually, both families realize that their respective 6 year old daughters have been kidnapped.
The police are called and it's not long till Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the owner of the RV, emerges as a suspect. But after being held and questioned by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), Jones is released due to lack of evidence and the fact that he has the IQ of a small child, and is likely incapable of committing the crime. But Dover isn't so sure. Fearing the worst, he takes matters into his own hands and kidnaps Alex, holds him in an abandoned building and tortures him for information.
You might be wondering what everyone else is doing during all this, the answer is not much. With so many big name cast members, you'd think the film might focus on how this kidnapping effects the lives of these two families, but no. Rarely are casts like this wasted so badly. Keller's wife, played by Golden Globe nominee Maria Bello, spends most of her negligible screen time siting in bed doped up on pills. Will their older son feel guilty as his negligence inadvertently aided the kidnappers in act one? No, he'll be almost completely forgotten.
It's the same problem with the Birch family, they are played by Oscar nominees Terrance Howard and Viola Davis and they are absent from the film for such outrageous stretches that it's easy to forget that they're in the movie at all and that they too have lost a daughter. Sometimes they show up so they can be complicit in Keller's crimes, but nothing much comes of it. However unintentional, the film seems to be telling us that in this situation, only the emotional struggle of macho white men are worthy of screen time.
Worse still is that the film doesn't do much with that screen time. The film has a lot of potential ideas to mine, but for much of the extravagant 153 minute run time we're punished by endless scenes of Dover yelling and torturing Jones, every one plays the same note except louder than the last. Each one not sure if it wants us to marvel at just how villainous Keller has become, or to agree with his methods. Occasionally the film reaches for religious symbolism – opening with Dover reciting Our Father, or occasional insert shots crucifixes – as a justification. But while the film does it's damnedest to get us to notice these images, it never does the hard work of attaching any meaning to them. It's window dressing Villeneuve uses so he can pretend to condemn Dover's brutality towards this mentally disabled man before ultimately excusing it.
While Dover brutally tortures Jones, Loki's investigation stumbles around, pursuing a series of increasingly implausible red herrings presented with all the ceremony of a Law & Order: SVU episode but without the self-conscious camp. We get murderous priests, and lots of snakes and mazes and bumbling on the part of the supposedly brilliant Loki and again, nothing much comes it except to put Loki in the right position to set up what may go down as the textbook example of how not to do an ambiguous ending.
Prisoners is the kind of film that mistakes misery for substance and as a result is a mean, sadistic bore. It puts us through the ringer only because it can, using serious issues and concepts like child kidnapping and faith in ugly, exploitative ways. Cinematographer Roger Deakins does great work lighting the thing, but don't be fooled by the film's artifice. It's just another tool the director uses to get you to think this film is more than just a shiny turd. Do yourself a favor and stay away from one of the worst films of the year.
Grade: D
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