Prisoners

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392214/combined

Prisoners tries real hard to be the epic kind of thriller that The Silence of the Lambs was, but falls way short. Although nicely photographed and generally attention-grabbing for about two and a half hours, there’s just too much missing for it to be the movie it wants to be.

First, there are hero issues. There are too many. Two fathers, one and a half mothers, a cop and a suspect are all involved with two girls who vanish in broad daylight. Father #1, played, maybe over-played, with intensity by Hugh Jackman and Terrance Howard’s more believable Father #2 go after the first suspect they come across. Then a cop played by Jake Gyllenhaal gets assigned to the case and wants so badly to make the lambs stop screaming he’s willing to bend some rules.

Then Mother #1, Viola Davis, gets involved with what the dads are doing while Mother #2, Jackman’s wife, retreats into a pharmaceutical fog. All of this is fine as far as thrillers go and the director does keep us interested in these people far longer than the story should allow. There are just too many characters to root for and no one really ends up earning our admiration or support. It might be Jackman’s 16-year-old son who is having a tough time living up to dad’s hyper-masculine countenance. You might feel sorry for Paul Dano as Suspect #1, but then again, he probably could have solved the whole thing for us in the first hour and we all could have gone home. Bad differently-abled character - no sympathy for you.

 Hugh Jackman begins his assault in Prisoners

In addition to having no hero worthy of Clarice Starling, there’s no villain in sight to compare with Hannibal Lector. What we get is a bizarre kind of B-movie, People Under the Stairs styled denouement and a shady priest with corpses in the closet thrown in for additional ickiness and to help add another hour to the film. (Fans of Sweeney Todd, the play-not the movie, might appreciate Len Cariou in the role of the priest.)

The worst… The very worst… After 160 minutes there are a lot of holes that don’t quite get filled in, if you’ll excuse the expression. It’s a shame because the movie looks great and there are some fine actors in roles that simply weren’t completely fleshed out. These lapses caused me and some others in the audience to leave the theater scratching our heads and then scratching each other’s heads for camaraderie.

This is the kind of movie you might rent for a buck or just wait for it to come to cable to watch on a rainy day when there’s nothing else on. And for that I’ll give it one Wilder because I did like looking at the pictures.

 

Our Overlooked Film of Significance for the week: Just see The People Under the Stairs. It’s a schlocky, cheaply-made, B-movie that somehow rises above its pedigree, with more substance than you might expect.