September 22, 2013

 

Despite its lengthy run-time, Prisoners is not only well-written but has brilliant acting. Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal are fantastic as a father doing anything it takes to save his missing daughter and a detective assigned to the case.

 

While the premise is straight-forward, the audience doesn’t get bored as the simplicity turns into twists that you don’t really expect. Keller Dover (Jackman) and his family visit their neighbors for Thanksgiving. The couples’ daughters ask to head back to the Dover home in search of a red whistle and never come back. The police are immediately contacted, in search of a run-down van the girls were playing on earlier in the day.

 

Detective Loki (Gyllenhaal) is the one who spots the van and takes in the driver, Alex Jones (Paul Dano) as a suspect. However, after an interrogation, Loki sees that Jones has the IQ of a 10-year-old, so he couldn’t possibly be the one who took the girls. Dover, on the other hand, thinks that even if Jones didn’t kidnap the girls, he knows something about their disappearance. In a weak moment, while watching Jones’ home, he kidnaps him and brings him to a run-down apartment building to torture him until he speaks. While his friends, Franklin (Terrance Howard) and Nancy (Viola Davis) Birch, don’t agree with what Dover is doing, but they don’t report him to the police either.

 

Meanwhile, as Dover continues to torture Jones, Loki continues to follow various leads. While searching the homes of sexual predators, he stumbles upon a dead man in a priest’s basement. During interrogation, Loki learns that the dead man was actually someone who had been kidnapping children. He also interviews a woman who’s son disappeared 25 years earlier. Then, during a vigil, he sees a suspicious man who runs when Loki gets a little too close for comfort.

 

Which suspect is the true criminal? I won’t give it away, but I will say that the ending is brilliant. This is one of the few dramas that kept the story moving at a good pace and kept you on your edge of your seat throughout. It pulled at the heartstrings of many in the audience. And I believe that no matter how much you really pay attention to the little bits and pieces, you probably won’t figure out ‘whodunnit.’ The one question I did have, and sort of wish they explored a little bit, was the demons Loki had. He had this twitch and a weird relationship with his boss, but it wasn’t expanded on.

 

And as always, I really liked this film because it was realistic. There was no fantasy, or that happy ending (not giving away by saying this), that is usually not realistic. This film was and I appreciated that until the very end.