Prisoners will captivate you!

Rating: 7/10 (6 December 2013)

Prisoners is a tense mystery-thriller that will spin you through fits of fear, repulsion, anger, and relief. We highly recommend it based on its overall enjoyability as a movie that provides expected chills along with personal moral questions when you put yourself into the hero's shoes. The beginning of the movie has a palpable sense that something bad is about to happen. It's a similar feeling that you get at the beginning of many horror movies where the characters are introduced as carefree friends through the use of pointless, mundane chatter and laughter. But once the girls disappear, it's on! Any of you who are parents, as we are, can instantly relate to that lightning strike of fear that shoots through you when you realize you don't know where you kid is. That tenseness remains with you through most of the movie as they try to unravel the circumstances around the disappearance. Jake Gyllenhaal does an adequate job as the plodding yet persistent investigator, Detective Loki. The audience will be put into a balancing act of rooting for Loki to find the abductor, and hating Loki for not laying down the law while we sympathize with the victim's father Keller Dover, played convincingly by Hugh Jackman. It's really the character of Dover that will have the audience gut-wrenched as they try to decide if they would take the law into their own hands as Dover does when, as often happens, the law lets the accused out of jail. While Loki partially redeems himself by finally getting tough with the suspects and finding his way to the abductor, he still loses points for allowing one suspect to commit suicide before he can get an answer out of him and allowing Dover to beat him to the crime scene. The Dover character lets us down by torturing the wrong suspect and by letting himself be captured at the end. So, neither main character fully rewards the audience. But the biggest letdown was the revelation of the old church lady that broke bad and started killing kids after losing her own son many years prior. It was an, "Uh, really?" moment for the audience. But despite these few flaws, the movie manages to hold the audience captive and deliver the punches expected of a knockout thriller. See it!