Film Review - Prisoners (2013)

Prisoners stars Hugh Jackman as Keller Dover, a small time repair man who heads to his neighbour's house to celebrate Thanksgiving when his young daughter and her friend go missing, Keller gets very determined to find her, no matter the cost.

It's hard to know where to begin when talking about this movie as in all honesty, I mainly thought it was just okay, nothing great but nothing all that terrible either, Jackman is sensational in his role and you believe fully his quest to find his lost daughter though at times his scenes where he gets angry made me think of when he was playing Wolverine, Jake Gyllenhall is also very good in his role and is a nice calming counterpoint to Jackman's increasing anger in frustration and I thought Viola Davis was very good as well in her small role.

But the film as a whole felt to me like a well worn path in terms of thrillers, the three key films it reminded me a lot of were River's Edge, Misery and the Silence of the Lambs and those three films I felt were superior to this film as to me the dark tones of Edge, the Abduction theme of Misery and the overall cold look of Lambs sort of began to blend together for me with the twist here being the children being kidnapped instead of the adults.

Those three other films were superior to this film in another way: They're not 2 and a half hours long, each of them is about 90 minutes to 2 hours long and for me Prisoners is simply too long for its own good and could've done with a good 20 minutes chopped from its running time, I'm kind of getting annoyed with films going over the 2 hour and 10 minute mark and while some films like the Place Beyond the Pines justified it, this film does not.

And so to wrap up, while I thought Prisoners was well made and has good performances, it also had an all too familiar feel for me and was simply too long and it's a bit of a shame as I like dark themed movies but this one missed the mark, 2 out of 5.