Review – Prisoners (Spoiler Free!)

I decided to watch ‘Prisoners‘ to pass the time on a journey – I’d missed it in the cinema and it definitely looked right up my street.

The story is relatively simple, the young daughters of Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard) are abducted, and Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is assigned to investigate. Quickly a suspect is found, but then subsequently released and a rather frantic Jackman decides to take matters in his own hands as he’s not happy with the investigation. Gyllenhaal is a hot shot cop with a 100% success rate in solving his cases, who seems to spend most of his screentime brooding and looking gorgeous (I know!) and slowly makes some headway in finding out ‘whodunnit’.

First off – it’s a BEAUTIFUL film, utterly, utterly beautiful – definitely one of my favourites, lots of long lingering shots, beautiful score. Also a lot of the violence is implied, you don’t see too much of it, just the (occasionally horrific) results. Jackman and Gyllenhaal are fabulous, really good, as is Maria Bello. The Birch family feel a little ‘flat’ – it’s probably because they don’t really get much screen time for their characters to develop. I can’t really say much else without spoiling the film, I must admit, I didn’t see the end coming!

It’s left me feeling a little funny though, not because of the subject matter, it’s the film itself, it seems to unfold very slowly – you get that that it’s not a fast paced, explosion packed, gun slinging affair pretty early on. Which is fine, I like the tease, but – I don’t know – it just feels TOO slow. I really enjoyed watching it, it held my attention and I was aching for the conclusion but when the film drew to the slightly silly close – I just felt a bit dead inside.

I think today on reflection I just feel a bit cross with the film. I just can’t put my finger on what is wrong with it, it looks great, sounds great, the acting and dialogue is fabulous and believable, the story is decent with a fairly satisfying end result but I just feel so ‘Meh’ about it. It should be perfect, I should feel pleased but, nope! 🙁

Have you seen it? What did you think?

If you fancy it – get it from Amazon!