Worst movie I've seen this year.

Rating: 2/10 (26 October 2013)

I really didn't like this movie. Not because of the gore, not because of the language, but because of the pacing, the acting and most definitely the ending. The movie went on for two hours and they left it hanging at a really stupid time - if you're going to purposely leave the ending hanging, leave it at a time point where it's a bit ambiguous and up to the viewer how it ends. But they left it hanging at a point where it's pretty obvious what's going to happen next, but denying the viewers the chance to see the story wrap up (why????)
The pacing was terrible. You hardly got a chance to feel and know the characters before things were happening. You felt no sympathy for the girls, who you saw for maybe a few minutes before they got abducted. You didn't share the mum's grief because her acting was so obviously forced. The guy who gets tortured and beaten was (surprise surprise) completely innocent, which was obvious right from the start. The dad is only ever shown stony-faced or blowing his tits in a rage, except for towards the end when his guilt over bashing up a guy who's clearly innocent makes him get stressed and say a few lines of prayer, and then torture the kid some more. And at the end when he finds out the culprit is the kid's aunt, he doesn't even show a single bit of remorse over the horrible thing he's done.
Also, the aunt: really? Urgh, so obvious. So tired of the same old formula in every thriller movie: killer turns out to be the one you least expect, someone you were introduced to at the start of the movie, and the crazy story behind them being the unlikeliest killer in the world is revealed only at the end. Halfway through the movie I used that formula to deduce the only person who fit it was the aunt, and prayed to God that this movie wouldn't follow the same boring cliché. But it did, even though they ended up adding a possible suspect later whose storyline they didn't bother to explain and whose purpose was simply to try and lead us off the right trail when they brought out the 'it's the aunt' card right at the end. What was with that guy? Why was he obsessed with pouring pig's blood on kids' clothes? Nobody cares, apparently.
Movie makers - if you're going to make the main character some sort of antihero who's morally ambiguous, who does awful things out of desperation, who thinks they're doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, actually put in some effort making us CONNECT with this character. Show us his human side, show him feeling guilt and remorse, show him with his head in his hands saying 'what have I done?', show him feeling worried as hell about his daughter, show him co-operating with the police because he realises that's his best chance of getting his daughter back. Give us a better reason for him taking the law into his own hands than just him thinking he's better than the police at judging who's a criminal and who's not. Show him TRYING to act like a decent human being before succumbing to his emotions and going ballistic. Show him doubting whether what he's doing is really right at all. Show that good side as well as the bad. REALLY show it, because the few moments he showed a sliver of distress, he seemed more angry/upset that the kid wasn't talking than that he may be doing something awful. Because this whole movie I was almost hoping his daughter would die just to serve him right. I felt more hatred towards the father who was alternating between praying to God and torturing a mentally disabled kid than the woman who abducted his child. Epic fail.