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Rating: 4 out of 5
According to the F.B.I., In the United States, an estimated 460,000 children are reported missing every year. Out of those 460,000, around 5,000 of those missing children are kidnapped. Just think about that for a second. 5,000 kids or more are taken from their homes, playgrounds, or wherever. That is a crazy stat to think of, and one of the craziest things is that this could only be a snapshot of the number of kids taken. Here is a question. What do you think would happen if your child was abducted and the police had a person in custody? What would you do? Would you let the police handle it, or would you try and get answers by kidnapping the assumed kidnapper and torturing them? Prisoners present the idea of what happens when a child is kidnapped, and the father decides to take matters into his own hands.
On Thanksgiving, the Dover family, Keller (Jackman), his wife Grace (Bello) and their teenage son Ralph (Minnette), and their little daughter Anna (Gerasimovich), spend dinner with their neighbors and friends the Birch family. The Birch family consists of Franklin (Howard), his wife Nancy (Davis) and their teenage daughter Eliza (Soul), and their little daughter Joy (Simmons). During the day, Anna and Joy want to play outside and first, have Ralph and Eliza watch them. The girls end up playing on an R.V. until Ralph and Eliza tell them to get off and come back home. After lunch, Anna asks her father to go to their house with Joy to seek her emergency whistle, and Keller tells her to call Ralph or Eliza to go with them. The day goes on until the family realizes that Anna and Joy are missing and nowhere in sight, along with the R.V. missing. They frantically call the police, who begin a search and find the R.V. that tries to drive off but runs in a ditch. Detective Loki (Gyllenhaal) is assigned to the case, and he arrests the teenager Alex Jones (Dano). As Loki interrogates Alex, he soon learns that Alex has the I.Q. of a ten-year-old boy and can’t possibly have kidnapped the children and soon is released from custody. Outraged over Alex’s release, Keller attacks Alex and demands to know where his daughter is. During the investigation, Keller kidnaps Alex and imprisons him in one of his remodeling homes. Keller tortures Alex for days and doesn’t get any closer to finding his daughter. As Loki investigates the case, Keller draws closer and closer to crossing the line between right and wrong.
This film really makes you think about how far one would go to finding a missing child. I have seen tv shows and other movies where a kid disappears and the family search night in and night out for the kid. This film just takes it five steps further when Jackman’s character kidnaps and straight-up tortures a kid he believes kidnapped his daughter. The shower scene was insane, and then to just build a room around the dude and keep torturing him almost makes you sick to your stomach because you don’t know if the kid took the kids or not. It really does make you think how far you would go to get your baby back.
Then on the flip, you have Loki trying to figure out who kidnapped the kids, and the film throws so many twists and turns. Like he follows Keller but gets nowhere and then finds another dude who has his walls covered in maze drawings and crates filled with snakes and bloody children’s clothes. The crazy part is that there are people like this in the world. When you think they have the dude caught, he grabs a police gun and blows his brains out. It was definitely a W.T.F. moment right there. Yet, you feel for Loki because dude has so much pressure on him to find the girls, and it almost seems like he isn’t getting anywhere.
I want to give major credit to director Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve presented a movie that is dark, gloomy, and downright gut-wrenching. One might think it’s a knock-off of Taken, but that was an extreme action movie with a father whooping some major ass because he had skills you have never seen before. Prisoners, on the other hand, is about the choices one has to find their daughter. Would you kidnap a person to gain information? Would you torture that person knowing deep down it’s wrong, but a child’s life is at stake? The choices seem more pronounce and in-depth in this film.
Now, one of the downsides to this film is the long-ass run time. Clocking in at 153 minutes, the movie gets a little long and somewhat loses the intensity in a few areas. It’s hard to get something this intense for such a long period of time. Around the two-hour mark, I was already ready for the movie to end but still had another thirty minutes to go.
This film also strives on the strong performances of Jackman and Gyllenhaal. First, Jackman was intense in his role as I had hardly seen him in a drama like this. Usually, I see him yelling at the top of his lungs and stabbing people as Wolverine. Yet, it is entirely different in this film, and he holds more of his own in this film. You can see the stress and anger on Jackman’s face as he tries to find his daughter. When he is torturing that kid, you can see that all his morals went way out the window.
Gyllenhaal was equally strong as Detective Loki. Honestly, let’s take a second now to call out the elephant in the room. You couldn’t have thought of a better name than Loki. Really? Did you watch any of the Marvel movies and go, yup, that’s the name of my detective? Gyllenhaal was intense but not as intense as Jackman. I felt like he tried to keep a level head through the whole movie, even when he had that moment where he lost it. You feel for the character because it seems like the minute he gets close, he messes up and has to start a new path to finding the truth.
Prisoners is a dark, violent, and disturbing film that makes you think about what is right and what is wrong when you are searching for a missing child. The film has an engaging but intense kidnapper plot to it that will keep you entertained. Jackman and Gyllenhaal are excellent in their respective roles. The only problem is the long runtime of this film. The question is, how far would you go to find your missing kid?
