Prisoners

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Live Streaming Movie Prisoners

Prisoners begins as a genuinely compelling and authentic bit of small-town Americana, as two families meet up for the Thanksgiving holiday. Hugh Jackman, Mario Bello, Terrence Howard, and Viola Davis convincingly play the kind of close friends that don’t need to force it, and they have a genuinely relaxed chemistry in the opening moments that earns our investment.  So when their respective younger daughters, both around six-years old, go missing while walking from one house to another, our empathy is earned and our interest is sealed. The opening moments of the investigation have a dirty, unflashy air of authenticity, as lead cop Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) centers on a mentally-impaired young man who seems like a plausible suspect.

But once that suspect is more-or-less cleared, and an enraged Keller (Jackman) decides to abduct young Alex (Paul Dano) and torture the “truth” out of him, the film starts to deflate just when it should be cooking. The film only remembers the whole “Keller is keeping Alex in a dirty makeshift cell” when the film needs us to remember, depriving us of a sense of urgency for this seemingly key plot thread.  While the picture arguably wants to raise “What would you do if it was your child?” moral questions, the picture so effectively convinces us of Alex’s likely innocence that what we see is not Keller committing a moral wrong for the greater good, but rather a delusional father torturing a potentially innocent man while the police follow more convincing leads.

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