Prisoners

After a man’s daughter is kidnapped, he resort to torturing the police’s prime suspect in order to discover her whereabouts.
As a thriller, this film follows the basic genre conventions. It’s tense, mysterious, and occasionally compelling. However, it seems the film’s ambitions are beyond a basic genre film. A lot of the film’s exposition establishes Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) as a survivalist — a right-wing, anti-establishmentarian — in order to explain his extreme behavior later. But this theme remains undeveloped. I can imagine a good film that questions whether a man’s personal moral compass should override the moral compass that most reasonable people agree to, but by the second act, the film devolves into torture porn and the generic dramatic questions overtake the film’s philosophical musings.
Jackman has never been an impressive actor, and what depth we see in Keller comes from the script, not his performance. The same can be said of Jake Gyllenhaal, and unfortunately the plot renders Maria Bello catatonic halfway through the film. The best performance is by Paul Dano, who never fails to impress.
Overall, as a thriller, Prisoners fits the genre, but as anything more, it’s close but not quite.