Not What I Expected

Rating: 6/10 (4 October 2013)

'Prisoners' tells the tough story of two young girls who are kidnapped on Thanksgiving. Both sets of parents struggle to cope as they are left helpless and have to rely on Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) to work on finding their missing daughters.
The story starts off a little too rosy and 'happy families.' This is soon over and the atmosphere and tension build up as the families realise their children are missing, presumed kidnapped. The film has a very bleak tone and is initially quite gritty. However, the story soon turns into a Hollywood tale rather than a heart breaking story.
'Prisoners' is really a film of two parts; the first is following rule-breaking Detective Loki as he tries to find the girls. His side is quite interesting and doesn't really have any negative aspects to it - it simply is what it is, an investigation. Hugh Jackman plays the father of one of the missing girls; he is understandably frustrated after the suspected kidnapper is let go due to a lack of evidence. He takes the drastic step of kidnapping the suspect and chaining him to a sink in an abandoned house to torture him. This is obviously to make the audience ask themselves the question 'what would I do in that situation?' As the film progresses, things get more and more extreme. It gets to the point where you realise no one in real life would ever do something like this and that is when 'Prisoners' looses its audience. Things just get too silly and unrealistic.
Hugh Jackman gives a really good performance but his character's actions become too bizarre. Terrence Howard is really bad which is surprising. He plays the other father and has to cry and be upset in numerous points of the film. He just does not look like he cares at all though - his crying scenes look incredibly forced and unnatural. The two mothers are shown to be useless which is a little disappointing and slightly offensive; Viola Davis could have gave a fantastic and powerful performance here but all her character does is stare into space. Maria Bello lies in bed the whole time because her character becomes depressed but doesn't really revive from it - it would have been good to see her beat the illness. Jake Gyllenhaal gives an admirable performance - although it is quite similar to that in the brilliant 'Zodiac,' he plays an investigator who has never failed to solve a case with his brash approach and his 'f**k-it' attitude. He is the only character in the entire film who isn't one-dimensional. Paul Dano also gives a great performance; he somehow manages to be creepy and seem so innocent at the same time.
The film could have focused more on the slow yet inevitable breakdown of the families rather than the endless - and ultimately pointless - scenes of torture. It was briefly mentioned in the beginning that Hugh Jackman's family are struggling financially - this is never mentioned again and it is fairly evidence that Terrence Howard's family are very wealthy. It seemed like such an obvious foreshadow that the two families would end up arguing at some point but they don't.
A lot of reviews have questioned the ending, many have found it annoying or weird. It is a strange way to end the film but, in context it is the most positive ending possible.
Overall, 'Prisoners' is quite disappointing; the story is unnecessarily complicated and becomes ridiculous. Most of the performances are good - particularly the leads. For a film like this you would expect there to be some really harrowing points - there were hardly any.