Prisoners

* First, the title is lame: the film is not really about prisoners.
* Next, Hugh Jackman overplays his role: he’s too macho, too out of control, too determined to beat the truth out of anyone in his way.
* Jake Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, is so down-low that his character seems catatonic at times.
* And, at 2 hours and 26 minutes, the movie is too long: I could easily edit out a full 15 minutes without losing either the tension or the need to know information.
* I also could not count the number of times the word “fuck” and its variants were used, but suffice it to say that it was over-used by all the actors throughout the film. There have to be other words available to pack a different kind of punch. Two plus hours of fuck this, fuck that gets old in a hurry.

That said, I enjoyed Prisoners. Attending an afternoon matinee, the theatre had seniors in the seats, so there was lots of loud whispering as we all guessed the directions the story took. I guessed “snakes” at one point, but was wrong; I’ll defend that there should have been snakes just to freak out the story a bit more.