Prisoners

There is a very serious moral question posed by Prisoners—can movie audiences abide the studio-sponsored torture of Hugh Jackman doing a decaffeinated riff on Sean Penn's yowling-at-the-heavens bit from Mystic River for 153 minutes? Jackman plays Keller Dover (seriously!), a handyman and closet survivalist whose daughter is kidnapped along with his neighbors' girl. The manhunt immediately leads to Alex Jones (Paul Dano), a mentally handicapped man who is exonerated for lack of evidence. Keller still suspects that Alex was involved in the abduction, so he takes the interrogation into his own hands, resorting to beautifully shot torture in order to recover his daughter. Director Denis Villeneuve made the Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee Incendies, but his American debut Prisoners just reheats the heavy-handed, high-gloss revenge porn of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the aforementioned Mystic River.