Prisoners directed by Denis Villenueve. Image courtesy of Warner Bros and Summit Entertainment.
2013’s Prisoners was really Denis Villeneuve’s proper introduction to the mainstream after dabbling in successful Canadian indies. It was a straight genre piece - a hardboiled thriller about a father whose daughter goes missing, the tough guy cop on the case, and a race against time to find the missing children. The cast is great: Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, Melissa Leo, Viola David, professional creep Paul Dano. The movie has quite a few twists and turns, although nothing too shocking if you’re familiar with the genre.
The main problem with this film is that the marketing gave away the initial twist that set up the middle section of the film which is that Hugh Jackman, driven mad with grief and rage, goes all vigilante on us and takes his number one suspect, Paul Dano, prisoner and basically tortures him trying to extract information. This is a fiendish little twist, especially as it plays against Jackman’s everyman father image. And had we not seen this coming, it would have been genuinely shocking. But we did see it coming, because it was in the fucking advertising for the film.
There are still a few more secrets to be uncovered in the film’s final stretch, and the movie ends on a wonderfully dark, ironic and ambiguous note, but I just wish the marketing for this film hadn’t given away the fact that Jackman was going to give us a full heel turn midway through. That’s the kind of plot device you really want to, you know, keep in your back pocket if you can and the studio let it get away from them.
Anyway, the movie did quite well at the box office. The cast is superb. And Villeneuve would build on this success to cement a string of hits over the next four years, eventually landing himself the keys to the Blade Runner franchise and, eventually, the Holy Grail of unfilmable properties, Dune. But if we trace that thread back just a few short years, it brings us to this solid, tightly-plotted thriller that was ruined by some lunkhead in the marketing department who thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we just showed the audience everything in the trailer!”