By any means necessary...

Rating: 5/10 (29 September 2013)

So how far would you go to get back your child who had just been kidnapped? That's the thrust of this dark movie which takes as its themes the disturbing and sadly, ever-topical subject of the abduction of young children and also the use of torture on the suspected perpetrator, even as I appreciate that the latter has only so far come into the public consciousness in the military world. Perhaps not being a parent and also something of a libertarian, I didn't find myself on the side of the, I hesitate to say, (avenging) angels and found the scenes of what I'll understatingly term rendition, as upsetting as they were unjustifiable in a so-called civilised society. Besides this I found the movie's condescension to the conventions demanded of Hollywood thrillers compromised the bigger subjects it attempted to address.
The fulcrum of the film is the disappearance and as we soon learn, kidnapping of two young girls, one white, one black, from their two families on Thanksgiving Night in an anonymous blue-collar US town. After the prime suspect, a young, mentally retarded man, is released for lack of corroborative evidence, the two fathers, Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard, decide to take matters into their own hands, the former leading the latter on and himself turning into a semi-crazed vigilante, abducting the suspect and creating a grisly torture chamber to extract the truth from him. Also becoming consumed with the case is the local one-man, or so it seems, police service, Jake Gyllenhaal, egged on by the impotence of the law he serves and a sympathy with the parents for their loss, he too struggles to preserve his sanity and necessary detachment from the case, but who of course still arrives at the Eureka-type resolution and ends up delivering, what I'll term a predictable Hollywood ending.
Personally speaking, I couldn't marry up the wider philosophical and ideological questions the film throws up with the conventions of the dynamics of a big-money feature. I found it pandered too much to our baser emotions when in truth it should have been more questioning of Jackman's methods and I think sends out the wrong message about taking the law into one's own hands, no matter the provocation. On a more mundane level, I was unconvinced by the denouement, even to the extent of the surprise identity of the actual perpetrator and also the insertion of curious red-herrings along the way and an unbelievable life-or-death race-against-time.
As for the acting, you'd certainly call it committed and driven, but for me anyway, both Jackman and Gyllenhaal failed to really engage me in their pivotal roles while the drawn- out direction, filmed to a backdrop of grainy, often rainy exteriors, never struck the required balance between docu-drama and nail-biting tension.
This movie was a tough, gruelling watch (one suspects there is a much-longer director's cut in the background) and while a welcome reduction of the ridiculously over-the-top takes we've seen recently from Hollywood on this upsetting subject (Liam Neeson's "Taken" films for example), still didn't get the balance right, in my eyes.