Prisoners, director Denis Villeneuve's first English-language film, is a tense thriller with a weird and inconsistent moral framework.
The film opens on Thanksgiving weekend in Pennsylvania. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) just took his teenage son hunting and the boy shot his first deer. We learn that Dover is a survivalist who values preparedness in all situations. He is also a religious man, who leads his family--son Ralph, young daughter Anna, and wife (played by Maria Bello, who I strongly dislike--more on that later) Grace--in prayer over a meal.
Setting up Dover as a man with extremely strong convictions, who is also handy with a deadly weapon or a toolbox, is crucial to the storyline. We'll see why in a bit.
The Dovers head over to their neighbors, the Birches, for a Thanksgiving meal. As the parents get tipsy on wine, the two young daughters--Anna Dover and Joy Birch--leave to go back to the Dover's house. But they never come back. After a neighborhood search turns up no sign of the girls, the cops get involved and the parents--particularly Dover--get more and more frantic.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays Detective Loki (was Detective Thor on vacation?). Loki follows a lead to an RV that the girls were supposedly seen playing near, and finds a mentally slow young man, Alex Jones (played sympathetically and beautifully by Paul Dano) behind the wheel. After interrogating Alex for 10 hours, Loki is convinced the young man is innocent. Unfortunately, Keller Dover isn't convinced, and when he gets word that Alex Jones is being released from police custody, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
*Spoilers below, y'all*
The plot splits into two story lines: one is a noirish whodunnit with Detective Loki chasing down leads to find the kidnapper of the girls. The other is vaguely torture pornish, with Keller Dover kidnapping Alex Jones and holding him hostage in an old apartment building, and then coercing his neighbor, Franklin Birch (Terrance Howard), into helping him "interrogate" Alex by pummeling the shit out of the poor guy. Dover is absolutely convinced that Alex knows where the girls are, despite the fact that Alex has the IQ of a 10-year-old, and barely understands what is going on. This ruthless conviction is a mirror of Dover's religious belief--and we see him saying the Lord's Prayer before continuing to torture Alex.
I found the use of faith as a motif in Prisoners to be distasteful and bizarre, given the plot. It seems, at least at the beginning, that the audience is being set up to view Keller Dover as a self-righteous hypocrite and violent nutcase who believes that the ends justify the means. I found this disrespectful to people of faith, who (mostly) aren't going to interpret Christianity to mean "torture your mentally slow neighbor by pouring scalding water on him until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit". I figured the film had an anti-Christianity bent that was going to reveal Dover to be the true monster, which I thought was simplistic and stupid.
Well...I was partially correct. In a twist, it turns out that although Alex Jones is indeed innocent, it is his "aunt" (Melissa Leo, invisible behind a gray wig and huge glasses) who has kidnapped the girls. Alex reveals a crucial bit of information that leads Dover to the aunt's house where he attempts (and fails) to rescue the girls. So...the moral of the story is...torture is justified? Sort of? [Note: upon further inspection, I remember that, in fact, another character in the film reveals the information that leads Dover to the aunt's house. So, actually, all that torture led to nothing].
More hilariously, when Dover confronts Alex's aunt, she reveals why she has made a habit of kidnapping children over the years--is a a weird sexual thing? Is she a sadist? No. She (and her late husband) were, and I quote, "waging a war on God". By kidnapping peoples' kids, they cause parents to lose faith and become "monsters like you" she says to Dover. All this because her kid died years ago.
WHAT!?? I'm sorry, but this is the stupidest motive a criminal in a movie has ever had. "Waging a war on God" by kidnapping kids? What kind of cockamamie bullshit is that? Children are abducted all the time in real life, and it usually has something to do with relatives kidnapping kids because of custody arrangements, or psychos taking children/teens for sexual and/or violent jollies (Ariel Castro, anyone?). I found the "big twist" to be laughably stupid and insulting to Christians, atheists, and everyone in between.
It also means that Dover was justified. By torturing his way into solving the mystery (before Detective Loki busts in to actually save the day), Dover is (kind of) a hero. And the bad guy is a woman so anti-Christian, she's taken to kidnapping kids and murdering them to force others to "lose faith". The logic is twisted and just...weird.
So Prisoners is a taut thriller up until the final 20 minutes or so when the whole thing falls apart. Hugh Jackman's character is incredibly unlikeable (and dumb! he spends the movie torturing a guy who obviously suffers from a mental disability) and his complacent neighbors are gutless and go along with his delusions. His wife, played by Maria Bello, spends the entire movie in bed, doped out of her mind to avoid facing the pain of her daughter disappearing. God, did I hate the character of Grace Dover--she is such a weak, stupid woman who has no idea what her husband is up to. And I've been side-eyeing Maria Bello ever since she made a comment about women wanting to be dominated by men when she played the role of another violent man's wife in A History of Violence (she made the comment in an interview when asked about the rape-y sex scene she has with Viggo Mortenson). I hate that shit.
On the plus side, Paul Dano's performance as Alex Jones (ironic name, given the career another Alex Jones has made out of bullshit conspiracy theories) is excellent. He elicits such sympathy, while still coming off as creepy. And Jake Gyllenhaal gives another one of his patented sexy, masculine--yet doe-eyed and introverted--performances as Loki. His performance, and the movie itself, remind me of another creeptastic thriller, Zodiac, also starring Gyllenhaal and much superior to Prisoners.
Finally, and this is a relatively small thing, but the cinematography in the movie is spot on. Gray, wet, November/early December in Pennsylvania. It's the perfect setting for a film about desperation and hopelessness.
Prisoners was entertaining and had some excellent performances, but the film's quite frankly wrong-headed message and the unbelievable motive of the bad guy left a bad taste in my mouth.
3.75 out of 5 stars
Was the film worth watching for a tattooed, buff Gyllenhaal? Imma say yes.
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