Review: "Prisoners"

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 153 minutes

You'll have to look awfully hard to find anything new in a film like Prisoners, the English language debut of Quebec-born filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. As written by Aaron Guzikowski, the film's tale of two missing girls and the search to find them covers its share of well-worn tropes, many of which can be found on one of the many police procedurals currently on TV. Yet thanks to superlative craftsmanship, effective plotting, and top flight performances, Prisoners rises above the average procedural, even though it never quite transcends the genre to achieve true greatness.

As the film opens, we see hear Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) reciting the Lord's Prayer as he and his son lie in wait for a deer to shoot. This immediate juxtaposition of faith and violence (on an innocent subject, no less) will echo throughout the film's tale of desperation, loss, and vigilante justice. On an overcast Thanksgiving Day, the youngest children of the Dovers (Jackman and Maria Bello) and the Birches (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) go missing. Though twitchy Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) quickly finds  potential suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the hunt for the girls has just begun. Frustrated with the police department's inability to find strong evidence, Keller takes matters into his own hands.

All of this takes up no more than the film's first 40 minutes, leaving roughly 110 more. Yet rather than cram the remaining runtime with twists and red herrings, Prisoners finds a smart, and even surprising, balance between the mystery driving the narrative forward, and the character drama that holds it all together. While this makes the narrative less immediately compelling, it allows Prisoners to explore its characters and the repercussions of their actions without having to rush. Rather than try to pull off something we've never seen before, the film simply takes familiar ingredients and executes them with a very sure hand. 

There's also the matter of the effort that's been put into the film's look, which does its best to distance itself from the small screen as possible. With its gloomy visual aesthetic and haunting flares of music, Prisoners owes as much to the crime thrillers of David Fincher as it does to TV dramas like Broadchurch and The Killing. Where the film receives a considerable boost is in the lensing from master cinematographer Roger Deakins. With its rainy, wintery suburban settings, there appears to be little room for a movie like Prisoners to have any visual flair. Yet Deakins, with all cylinders firing from start to finish, finds ways of capturing the dreary and plain settings with a level of artistry that feels wholly cinematic, yet never pretentious or distracting.

The cast certainly aren't shirking their duties either. Stacked with talent in every major role, the entire ensemble gives it their all. Even Bello and Davis, whose characters are somewhat underutilized, have moments that they knock out of the park. Dano is effective as well as the mumbly Alex, while Melissa Leo underplays her ambiguous role as the boy's doddering aunt. Of the supporting roster, however, it's Howard who makes the strongest impression. Some of that is due to how the script uses the character, but the actor finds ways of communicating grief and confusion without ever being redundant. As one of the cast members who spends the most time playing off of Jackman, Howard makes his straightforward character a nicely conflicted foil. 

Where the acting really shines, however, is in the leading duo of Jackman and Gyllenhaal. The roles are radically different, yet the way they reflect the dual strands of Prisoners' narrative creates a compelling blend of material driven by pure emotion and by pure clinical determination. Jackman, coming off of a career high with Les Miserables, has the emotional side of the story to carry, and the ferocity he brings to the role is never less than gripping. For all of the hysterical yelling involved, the actor never sounds shrill or false. It may not be subtle work, but Jackman invests each growl and yell with a fury that would make even Wolverine cower. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Gyllenhaal, who makes the less emotive role work in his favor. He puts a nervous bit of blinking, though initially distracting, to smart use as a means of communicating the character's internal processing of events.

Behind the scenes, Villeneuve deserves immense credit for his intelligent balance between the emotional and the procedural elements of the story. His previous film, 2010's Oscar-nominated Incendies, marked him as a talent to watch. Though more harrowing than Prisoners, that film also suffered from a messiness that built to a pair of twists that bordered on laughable. Prisoners runs nearly 15 minutes longer than Incendies, but it feels remarkably more focused, despite the room it allows for slow-building drama. Procedural mysteries live or die by how well they pull you in. Even the best of the genre, such as The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, have their implausibilities upon reflection. Yet what makes a great procedural work is its ability to cast a strong enough spell to allow you to suspend your sense of disbelief. Following in the footsteps of those aforementioned films, Prisoners certainly succeeds on that level, albeit with less flash (you'll find no lip-smacking cannibals). 

The lone disappointment of Prisoners, however, stems from the very aspect of its script that also makes it a success. By aiming for character-based drama over thrills, the film starts to feel more generic as a whole, despite the first rate filmmaking. There's a tantalizing taste of the more ambitious, possibly pulpier, movie that could have been made in the form of a mysterious maze symbol. You can practically feel Guzikowski contemplating whether or not to take said symbol and use it to turn Prisoners into a denser and more twisted story. Instead, the resolution of the maze, and the main plot, comes across as rather expected, even though it's as well-crafted as everything that precedes it. 

In straddling the line between thoughtful character drama and attention-grabbing thriller, Prisoners somewhat robs itself of a sharper identity. In trying to focus more on emotional developments, the film forgets to give itself a memorable stamp. Not content to end with a whimper, however, Prisoners ends (and the sound team deserves kudos here) its somewhat mundane narrative with a brilliant piece of ambiguity. Just when it seems in danger of fading out forgettably, it throws in one last nasty little kick that ensures that it'll stay with you just a little bit longer (Law and Order looks cheerful in comparison). It may not be the next Zodiac, but Prisoners is still an compelling and satisfying mystery with a refreshingly adult look at unsettling subject matter. 

Grade: B+

Review: "Oblivion"

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Runtime: 126 minutes

Rather than try to prove his critics wrong with his second film, director Joseph Kosinski seems perfectly content with delivering more of the same. Just like 2010's TRON: Legacy, Kosinski's Oblivion delivers some entertaining moments and stunning visuals, yet is hindered by a disappointingly thin screenplay. Despite its problems, it's difficult to suggest seeing Oblivion anywhere outside of the theater, where Kosinski's visuals do the best job of distracting one from the flawed writing. 

Set some 60 years into the future, mankind is recovering from a devastating attack that occurred in 2017. Most of humanity has been evacuated to one of the moons of Saturn. Left behind are Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and Victoria (Andrea Riseborough). They're part of a crew designed to repair drones that protect energy-gathering machines from the scattered remnants of the alien horde. As Harper informs us in the opening voice over, humanity won the war against the alien attack, yet lost Earth in the process. The pair are guided by Sally (Melissa Leo, appearing strictly on fuzzy video monitors), the head honcho of the ship that will eventually take Jack and Victoria off to join the rest of humanity. 

However, the situation becomes complicated when a craft crashes on Earth containing human passengers. The lone survivor is Julia (Olga Kurylenko), who eerily resembles a woman from Jack's strange dreams of the pre-invasion Earth. Julia's introduction to the plot is, at first, one of Oblivion's high points. Yet it doesn't take long for Kosinski and co-writer Karl Gadjusdek to begin stumbling through the remainder of the plot. 

Where the film starts to come apart is in the script's desire to tackle so many different story ideas that audiences have seen before in science fiction. Once Kosinski and Gadjusdek start piling on the twists and revelations, Oblivion's narrative becomes fractured, and the pacing is thrown off (the second hour feels far too long in comparison to the first). Rather than carefully select a few tropes to tackle, Oblivion tries to throw so many ideas together that the narrative becomes jumbled as it charges into what should be a heart-pounding conclusion. Certain developments lack weight because Kosinski's storytelling simply goes through the motions. This is most evident when, just before a major moment in the story, Kosinski decides to try and create the world's shortest love triangle, rather than just stick to the character relationships that have already been established (empty as they are). 

Compounding the narrative problems is that the role of Jack Harper is too thinly written, and Cruise doesn't bring any sort of spark in his performance to make up for it. It's the sort of role he's played far too many times, and as a result his work here isn't terribly engaging. There's no real sense of who Harper is outside of his job, and Cruise's performance doesn't inject the role with any personality. Thankfully, the supporting cast put in some effort with their roles, albeit with varying degrees of success. Melissa Leo proves that she can be enjoyable even when she's never even seen in person, while Kurylenko is solid as the woman responsible for Jack's disillusionment with his mission. However, the standout, if there is such a thing here, is Andrea Riseborough. More than any member of the cast, she's able to take even the most functional lines and imbue them with a liveliness that suggest that she should have been the film's hero. Though she has just as little to work with as anyone else, Riseborough is the only member of the cast who fully sells her material. 

Yet other than Riseborough's solid work, the only other standouts of the film are technical. And, to be fair, there's a lot to be said for Oblivion's technical accomplishments. As with TRON: Legacy, the settings and landscapes are gorgeously rendered, giving the film an incredibly polished look. Sets are also nicely rendered, balancing the sleek modernism of Harper's outpost with the cluttered remains of Earth.  The film is also carried along by first-rate sound work, and a knockout score from French electronic group M83, which helps keep the film from becoming totally stagnant, even with the flow of events is disrupted. 

Unfortunately, these technical achievements aren't enough to rescue Oblivion from being more than a workman-like mishmash of different concepts. The material is simply too flat to begin with. While Kosinski has conceived some fantastic visuals, he has delivered them without any sort of flair so as to really make them pop. Whatever flaws there are, Oblivion could have been a stronger experience overall if it had been able to create at least a few genuinely rewarding cinematic moments. While there are scenes that are exciting or intriguing, there's nothing about the execution to make them stand out. Kosinski has crafted impeccable visuals, yet seems to have stopped there, content to let them speak for themselves. As it turns out, they have precious little to say. 

Grade: C

Review: "Flight"

Director: Robert Zemeckis
Runtime: 138 minutes

Robert Zemeckis' Flight, the director's return to live-action filmmaking after three divisive motion-capture efforts, is certainly a polished, well-made film. After his trio of soulless animated features, the director proves that he's still game as ever when it comes to working with real people, sets, and locations. Yet Zemeckis' energetic direction isn't quite enough to prevent Flight from stumbling thanks to its script, even though he does keep the film from going into a complete nosedive. 

Whip Williams (Denzel Washington), as is quickly established, is a womanizer, an alcoholic, and an avid cocaine user. He's also pilot. While it's not a good combination, there's no doubt as to Williams' skill in the cockpit. On a routine (and very short) flight, Whitaker's plane endures a series of malfunctions, eventually pitching into a straight dive. Almost miraculously, Whip successfully lands the plan after rolling it not once, but twice before setting down in a field behind a small church. Six people die in the course of the landing, but Williams is hailed as a hero, even as he flees the spotlight. Yet complications arrise when blood samples taken after the accident reveal levels of intoxication in Williams and another crew member. 

From there, Flight glides ahead with energetic camera work and solid performances, even as the script constantly throws in some unwelcome turbulence. As capably as the cast performs (Washington is as engaging and watchable as ever), John Gatins' script is both too thin and too morally muddled. Whip's alcoholism is treated more as a plot device than a character trait. While the portrayal of alcoholism (and the self-deception involved) likely hits some truthful notes, we never have any grounding as to why Whip drinks the way he does. At best we know that his drinking was responsible for ending his marriage, but the conflict is too thinly detailed to hit home. 

Credit should go to Washington, however, for taking a relatively one-dimensional character and making him compelling to follow, even if it's more due to the actor's inherent star magnetism. With a richer script and a deeper character to latch onto, Washington could have truly soared. Instead, he's left putting in a lot of emotional effort into a role that is written at a level far beneath him. 

Other cast members aren't so lucky. Don Cheadle, as a lawyer tasked with sorting out Whip's side of the criminal investigation, has the script's least developed major character. Yes, his character's purpose is ultimately to support and challenge Whip, but the character appears to have been written on autopilot, used more as an expository tool of legal information. Kelly Reilly, as drug addict Whip meets in the hospital, gets a tad more to work with, but the role is as shallow as they come, as she's used more to bring up the painfully thin AA subplot in the film. Gatins gives her an interest in photography to lend her something outside of her drug troubles, but it's barely touched upon. Worst of all, the film wastes Melissa Leo as the head of the investigation into the crash landing. John Goodman also pops up in two irritating scenes, one of which is so bizarre and confused in its morality and tone that it beggars belief.

Surprisingly, it's some of the smallest parts that stand out in the film. Washington and Reilly's performances (mostly the former's) have received the most awards talk, but the stand out of the cast might actually be James Badge Dale. The actor only appears for one scene, yet his turn as a rambling cancer patient is nothing short of electrifying, and it's a shame that the actor wasn't used to better effect. Honorable mention should go to Brian Geraghty (The Hurt Locker) as Whip's co-pilot during the crash landing, who brings an extra layer of intensity to one of the many one-note roles filling out the ensemble.

Unfortunately, as Flight progresses through its three main "chapters," it becomes weaker and weaker. The crash landing is a marvel of white-knuckle intensity, but once Whip wakes up in the hospital, the drop in dramatic power is tremendous. The middle section, which had the most room for character development, squanders it on scenes that merely coast by. Both Whip's relationship to Reilly's Nicole and the background details of the investigation are touched on so lightly that it's as if Gatins nearly forgot about them. There's a level of expert craftsmanship in Flight, even down to the seemingly "normal" but richly textured cinematography. Yet, unlike some examples in recent memory (Joe Wright's Hanna springs to mind), said craftsmanship isn't nearly enough to overcome the overarching weaknesses of the writing. The great irony, then, of Flight is that it only soars when its titular character is plunging straight down out of the sky.

Grade: C

Trailer for "The Fighter"

Yet another long-concealed mystery debuted its first footage its week: David O. Russel's The Fighter. Starring Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo, the film's plot is as follows:

A look at the early years of boxer "Irish" Micky Ward and his brother who helped train him before going pro in the mid 1980s.

While the performers appear to be in top form, the way the trailer is cut feels a bit stale. It's your usual down-and-out-athlete-who-takes-a-stab-at-glory-against-all-odds story, at least the way the trailer is presented. Really, the only thing I'm amped for after seeing the trailer, which will hit limited release on December 10, is Amy Adams' performance, if only because the role is so much darker and grittier than the past few major roles she's had. At least now, AMPAS clearly loves Adams, and a going-against-type role, if well received, could land her a third nomination, and even a win for Supporting Actress, a category that isn't exactly stacked with buzzy contenders at the moment (save for 99% likely entry Diane Wiest). Bale looks solid as well, though he could prove to be one note if every scene looks like the glimpses in the trailer. Wahlberg looks...fine. He's a solid enough performer, but I really think we've already seen the best he has to offer as an actor (maybe he should take a cue from Ben Affleck?). And then there's poor Melissa Leo, who despite being an Oscar nominee, can't even get her name in the damn title cards, despite being one of the four major roles. There's just something flat-out wrong about that.

On the set: "The Fighter"

I have to say, I like seeing this new, darker side of Amy Adams. Nice to see that isn't letting herself get caught in the wide-eyed-innocent role.