by Brett Parker
Prisoners is a thriller that wants to display both the traumatized grit of Mystic River and the macabre perversity of Seven, yet it quickly shows us that such a combination can be quite the tall order for even the most game of productions. The film’s grand dramatic perceptions and kinkier plot points don’t exactly meld comfortably with each other, and they put a hindrance on the film’s hopes for transcendence. But you can’t accuse the script of being lazy, for even the more boneheaded developments are intricately planted with a clockwork shrewdness, and the cast swings for the fences as if they’re utterly convinced this B-movie could be the next great American drama.
The movie opens on a rainy Thanksgiving where carpenter Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his family celebrate the holiday with their married neighbor friends, Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy (Viola Davis). It’s a seemingly relaxed affair until the grown-ups notice that their daughters Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) and Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) went for a walk and never returned. The girls were last seen playing near a mysterious RV parked in the neighborhood, and this leads to police detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) being called in to investigate. Loki tracks down the RV parked by woods next to a highway, and he discovers a mentally-challenged introvert named Alex (Paul Dano) holed up inside.
A lack of any evidence inside the RV and Alex’s apparent low-I.Q. force the police to let him walk, but Keller expresses serious doubts. Alex appears to have dropped some curious and ambiguous hints that he may have encountered the girls at some point and Keller is furious that the police aren’t doing anything more about him. So while Loki hurtles himself into a complex and disturbing investigation, Keller kidnaps Alex at gunpoint and decides to conduct his own interrogation. He holds him hostage in an abandoned apartment complex and plans on beating and torturing him until he reveals information about the girls’ whereabouts. Can Loki solve the case before Keller goes too far?
The big idea here is how an unspeakable tragedy can turn everyone involved prisoners of tortured emotions and devilish impulses that come awfully close to resembling the dark forces that orchestrated the tragedy in the first place. So the best thing about the film is the way the seasoned cast wrings startling anguish from their arsenals to give such themes a bruising resonance. The big standout is Jackman, who relentlessly delivers such excessive intensity that you truly wonder if he passed out from exhaustion after every take. If you’ve ever watched a thriller and thought certain characters didn’t get worked up or mad enough over a dangerous situation, then Jackman’s performance will stun you. I think even Wolverine would flinch from this character, which should tip you off to how strongly Jackman’s rage illuminates the core of a desperate father pushed to the brink. As for Gyllenhaal, it’s not hard to see parallels between his character here and the one he played in Zodiac, for both are morose obsessives fixated on a dark case. Yet he’s alert and lively enough here to excel past police archetypes. Howard and Davis also prove compelling in roles that reveal themselves to be the anchors of moral reasoning amidst the chaos all around them. Dano nicely plays up his more neurotic and strange traits to craft a convincing outsider whose mental state truly keeps you guessing. And I give Melissa Leo serious props for bringing a lived-in gravity to a seemingly simple character with a faulty background.
All of this is certainly gripping and suspenseful as it rolls along, but then everything starts to flirt with macabre territory that isn’t too terribly far off from, say, Psycho or The Silence of the Lambs. The problem is that these developments prove to be either too preposterous or too vague to hold any real weight. There’s much ado about a specific red herring character whose very nature is so magnificently ridiculous that I couldn’t buy it for the life of me (he could be the most insane literary nut ever, my apologies to Annie from Misery). When everything is revealed in the end, the outcome is so strangely over-the-top that you feel it leans more towards screenwriting contrivances than realistic horrors. To be fair, there’s enough hints and clues in the script to oppose the notion that the ending is all trucked-in nonsense, but it doesn’t color in the kind of credible depth the film’s bigger ideas cry out for.
In spite of its sporadic clunkiness, Prisoners is still a gripping entertainment with considerable brains in its head. Like any good mystery, it pulls you in deeper every step of the way and you’re willingly alert to every new revelation, even if they do turn out to be a bit unsatisfying. Perhaps if the film ditched its horror show pretensions, it could’ve reveled more strongly in its ideas of end-justifying-the-means torture and hysteria breeding moral irresponsibility, turning up the temperature on a truly haunting critique of modern day America. Even though the film pulls a few punches with this idea, it’s still impressive to see a Hollywood vehicle willing to dive into such darkness. And it’s also thrilling to see that in a roll-call of powerful thespians, Jackman emerges as the hands-down champion in this acting event.
