Great director's English-language debut spoiled by too-clever-by-half (and then some) screenplay

Rating: 7/10 (1 March 2014)

When I read that French Canadian art-house phenom Denis Villeneuve was directing an English-language thriller about a distraught father searching for his missing child, it seemed like the perfect project for him. His prizewinning "Incendies" is a brilliant film that deals with the most basic human emotions in a powerful and affecting way. This one, unfortunately, is not. "Prisoners" is a long movie with an increasingly complex storyline, but there's not much characterizing going on—we learn that the distraught father (Hugh Jackman) is a gun-toting, prayer-mumbling, Star-Spangled-Banner-in-the-shower-singing hothead and that his adversary, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), is an all-about-the-job guy who eats Thanksgiving dinner alone in a Chinese restaurant. That's about it.
The suspense implicit in the basic setup—two little girls go missing from a quiet suburban street; vigilante dad runs amok—starts to wear off with about an hour to go. Then screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski heads off on an ingenious but time-wasting tangent, seemingly dragging in some leftover occultist bushwa from "True Detective," and the whole movie pretty much goes to hell in a basket full of snakes I assume the filmmakers wanted to leave us thinking about the larger implications—is torture justified to save a child's life? Maybe even, do gun-toting, prayer-mumbling, patriotic family values necessarily end up at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib?
Instead I was left wondering whether the last few puzzle pieces would have be to hammered into place. Talking of which—be aware that there are a couple of very violent scenes; my wife bailed after Jackman's character threatens to tune up a suspect with a clawhammer. Fine performances, great cinematography. Netflix subscribers: If you don't mind subtitles and what the cable channels call "adult themes," send for the Blu-ray of "Incendies."