Unnecessarily long

Rating: 5/10 (9 May 2019)

The film starts well, and sets up the scenario well, but halfway through, it really starts to become a bit of a dirge, with some silly flaws and incompetences.
It's interesting that they've set a Catholic priest as another paedophile! Easy option? Easy target? I wonder if they'd also considered making the paedophile from another - particular - 'religion'...? Methinks not!
Alex is described as having "the IQ of a 10-year-old". This is incorrect and an irrelevance. Children are IQ-graded relative to the population at their particular developmental level. This doesn't mean that *all* children have a lower IQ than adults. In fact, IQ actually *lowers* with age. So, some children will have a higher IQ than many adults. What they should've described Alex as is retarded or having learning disabilities.
When Alex went missing, why didn't the police put a tail on the two fathers immediately? They took their time to figure it out. Surely it would be most obvious the likelihood right away.
The film becomes very, very slow from the final hour or so. It thus becomes unnecessarily long... could easily have been done in 1.5 hours rather than the whopping 2.5 hours.
The police don't seem to be able to put 2+2 together. The father goes missing after he's told by Joy that he was near them at one point, and yet the police - finally discovering that the old woman was the abductor - still doesn't figure out that just maybe he'd gone to the old woman's house and gotten into trouble.
Also why, at no point, do the police not use sniffer dogs??? For this story, the mystery would've been solved very quickly.
The acting is reasonably good but, I think, later suffers a little due the unnecessarily long length of the film. Although I don't - generally - like Gyllenhaal,I think he is quite good in this... as is Jackman.
Overall a watchable film, although it does get somewhat boring from just over halfway.