Recencies van critici

The inflated scale and intensity, with its potboiler twists and grand statements about the futility of vengeance and the wages of sin, were not only a test of Villeneuve's skill set, but of his integrity as well — the annals of film history are replete with tales of once-idiosyncratic artists who allowed themselves to lapse into mercenary work. But as mechanical as it may be on the level of plot, the film is so richly atmospheric that its best moments transcend genre and feel genuinely poetic.

Was Sicario made in repudiation of the politics of Prisoners? As risible twists accumulate, Prisoners slowly slips from riveting to ridiculous, but what's most abhorrent about screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski's conception is also what makes the film weirdly compelling...

Prisoners, however, is hollow and... increasingly shoddy. Admittedly it's the kind of bad movie you can recommend, the premise and moody atmosphere being enough to draw devotees of forensic crime novels and TV shows like Criminal Minds; but you wait and wait for the film to shift to the next level – a level that might justify its excessive running-time – and it just doesn't. It's nothing but red herrings, spurious God talk and lurid details, plus actors with Oscars in their eyes.

It's strange that, for a film with more than one outwardly religious character (especially Keller himself), there's almost no thought given to the moral weight behind a single action carried out over the film's 153 minutes. Rather than an intentional show of cynicism, this reads as a simple lack of depth.

For all its vaulting thematic ambition and a narrative blueprint which harks back to the bruising dynamics of classical tragedy, Prisoners just does not manage to compute. As the story develops, the red herrings pile up, "truths" are overturned, and character motivations become less and less rational. This, in turn, severely dulls the impact of its against-the-clock denouement and prompts a state of nagging bewilderment rather than the frazzled satisfaction to which is clearly aspires.

Guzikowski's well-honed thriller (it was much admired for its expert mechanics on the 2009 ‘Black List' of unproduced scripts) occasionally idles under Villeneuve's dark character studies, but the director's powerfully imposed mood of dread elevates what might otherwise have been just a superior police procedural.

You can tell this is a marketplace movie. The more audacious film would have put Davis and Howard in Jackman's and Bello's roles. They're the stronger actors. I might have rolled my eyes at that idea before seeing Prisoners because, going in, it'd be hard to believe that a movie could go out of its way to underuse them. Each couple loses a daughter, but the story turns into a vehicle for Jackman's rage.

[Villeneuve] is no stranger to the purposeful cinematic parable, and his last film, "Incendies," was so portentous in its straining for heavy-osity that it might have made my "Worst of 2010" list, had I compiled one. But I have to give him credit here. With the help of his excellent cast and a great tech crew (the lensing from Roger Deakins is particularly acute and disciplined), he casts a spell that keeps "Prisoners" gut-wrenchingly engaging for all of its two-and-a-half-hour running time.

[The] opening is so heavy-handed that it's amazing that the film doesn't instantly collapse under its symbolic weight. Shot by the great Roger Deakins, regular cinematographer for the Coen brothers, the movie is drenched in rain and drained of color. Aspects of "Prisoners" are effective, but for the most part it's rather ridiculous (despite the fact that it clearly wants to be taken super-seriously), and there's an overwrought quality to much of the acting.

When writhing snakes make their appearance, Prisoners seems to have become a florid symbolist essay on the nature of evil. But come the climactic confrontation—the best bearding-the-demon-in-its-lair scenes since The Silence of the Lambs—the film has won back its credit. (Only to lose a few points for winking at its own cleverness in the open-ended coda.)

The presence of Gyllenhaal—combined with the movie's chiaroscuro lighting, emphasis on destructive obsession, and many narrative dead ends—brings to mind David Fincher's Zodiac; as if to underscore this, Gyllenhaal's character has zodiac signs tattooed on his knuckles, and is introduced discussing the Chinese Zodiac with a waitress. But like the movie's allusions to the need for religious meaning... its Zodiac game is ultimately just a way to lend secondhand depth to a simple story.

Prisoners opens with the Lord's Prayer, as recited by Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman]... It's not the most original way to start a movie [...but] it has a kind of primal solidity, a tribal timelessness. Such totemic signifiers are all over the opening scenes of Prisoners: the "Star-Spangled Banner" played (poorly) on a trumpet; "Jingle Bells," the "Batman smells" version; even the Chinese Zodiac. We sense that the film's characters live in worlds defined by clear boundaries.