Prisoners (2013)

The moral of the story is that you are so gonna get your ass kicked if you steal Wolverine's kid.

Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is a family man who runs his own carpentry business.  His family attends Thanksgiving dinner at the house of his neighbors, the Birch's.  After dinner, the youngest daughters of both families, Anna and Joy, take a walk back to the Dover's home, only they never return.  While looking for the kids, Keller's son recalls a parked RV the kids were playing on, but is no longer there.  When the police find the RV, they arrest the driver, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), but can find no trace of the kids.  Making this more difficult is that Alex has the intelligence of a 10-year-old, so getting any kind of useful information out of him isn't likely.

Not having any real evidence to hold Alex, the police are forced to let him go.  Convinced that Alex knows the location of the kids, Keller kidnaps and plans to torture him until he reveals where they are.  Meanwhile, the detective that's in charge of the investigation, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), looks into every possible lead, even Keller.

Prisoners is a super intense film that had me on the edge of my seat throughout.  Hell, I jumped more times watching this than I did when seeing Insidious: Chapter 2, and that's a horror film.  I heard several gasps from those sitting around me.  The reactions from the audience added to the experience, and is why I love seeing movies like this.

I was a little nervous when I saw that Prisoners was two and a half hours long.  Considering the weight of the subject matter, I thought it might drag.  While I did notice the length in a few parts, overall it didn't feel like a two and a half hour movie.  It's barely 5-10 minutes into the film before the kids are abducted, and once that happens the tension escalates and never lets up.  Prisoners is also not bogged down with needless exposition.  For example, you get closeness of the Dover and Birch families without having to be told how they met or how long they've known each other.

Much like the characters, you'll go through a range of emotions and opinions throughout the film.  There are times you'll feel bad for Alex as Keller is torturing him, but then you'll think he's hiding something, so maybe this needs to be done.  Franklin (Terrence Howard) struggles with the morality of what they are doing to this guy, where his wife, Nancy (Viola Davis), goes along with it as a necessary evil to get their kids back.  Meanwhile, Keller's wife Grace (Maria Bello), has taken to medicating herself as she can't deal with it at all.  Even your opinion of Detective Loki will change.  At the beginning, he's a little cocky and seems like he's going through the motions.  He even does that patronizing, "Sir, what I'm gonna need for you to do for me is calm down", when dealing with the raw emotion of Keller. Then you see his own emotional investment in the case develop the longer he works on it.

However, the character I most identified with was Keller.  While his methods are extreme, I look at it from the angle of the father.  I don't have any kids myself, but I have two nephews roughly in the same age range.  If they ever went missing, I would tear the world apart to find them.  That's Hugh Jackman's Keller Dover, and I totally understood the lengths he was willing to go to get his daughter back.

Hugh Jackman may have been nominated for an Oscar for Les Miserables, his role in Prisoners is easily his best.  It's such a passionate performance that I couldn't help but get wrapped up in it.  As we're getting towards the end of the year there's already Oscar buzz about Prisoners and expect to see Jackman's name in the mix again.  While Jackman is going to get the lion's share of the buzz, I wouldn't be surprised to Gyllenhall's name thrown around, too.  The entire cast is fantastic and there isn't a weak link in the bunch.  Even Melissa Leo has a small role, and once again she proves to be chameleon.  I don't know what it is about her that I never realize she's in a movie until I see her name in the credits.

If there's anything about the film I thought was a little weak it was that there a bunch of red herrings, and it all wraps up a little too neatly.  Some of them are obvious from the outset, like when they go out of their way to mention that Keller has an old, abandoned building left to him from his father.  I wonder where he's going to hide Alex away?  Others are a little more subtle and don't pay off until much later.  It's a minor complaint though, and they weren't handled in a clumsy way.  I thought Aaron Guzikowski's screenplay was very smart overall.  I also have to applaud director Denis Villeneuve, not just for the pacing, but how balanced everything was.  Even how many shots were framed were very well done.

Prisoners is an emotional, haunting ordeal.  It's the kind of intense and disturbing that makes you feel like the film punched you in the gut after.  Despite the weight of the film, it features powerhouse performances that make this a must watch.

4.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

The Company You Keep (2013)

The company you keep, you put yourself above.  I'm on to you!  I still have a soft spot for Hurricane...

Not that the hair-band Hurricane has anything to do with The Company You Keep, the latest Robert Redford directed film, based off a Lem Dobbs screenplay, which was based off the (presumably boring) book of the same name by Neil Gordon.

I might have just played my hand with the previous paragraph, but that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the film.  It's boring.  The Company You Keep is one of those films where they've assembled a great cast of pros (it's well acted at least), then setup a what appears to be a nice thriller/mystery, only to have it play out extremely slowly, with each reveal having no real impact.  This, again, is compounded by the fact this poorly paced film is over two hours.  BROKEN RECORD!  Hey, who said that?  At first glance, when you see the people involved in making the film, and the great cast, you think it might be an early Oscar contender.  Unfortunately, that isn't what we got here.

The Company You Keep begins with Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) being arrested.  We learn that she was a former member of a radical group wanted for a bank robbery and murder of a bank guard nearly 30 years ago.  Local reporter Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf) investigates and finds that Sharon was about to turn herself in anyway, and through friends tried to get a local lawyer, Jim Grant (Redford), to take the case.  Grant wasn't interested in the case even though it seemed like something in his wheelhouse.  Shepard presses on, only to find that Grant was also involved in the radical group, and was a suspect in the same bank robbery.  Don't worry, this isn't a spoiler to tell you this.

Grant goes on the run, contacting estranged friends and family in the effort to find Mimi (Julie Christie), a former partner of Grant's.  We aren't sure exactly why Grant is so desperate to find her, but upon seeing that Grant is wanted by the police, she goes out on her own to find him.

This is where The Company You Keep let me down.  You've got all these threads going on with Grant and Mimi, then The Beef (that's what I call LaBeouf) investigating, and the FBI (led by Terrence Howard) hot on their trail, but there's never any urgency to it.  Plot threads and characters are just dropped without any resolution or given much development.  It felt like a TV series that was meant to stretched into a season long arc, but was streamlined to only be two or three episodes.  You might think that means it has a frenetic pace with all the things going on, yet we got the opposite.  It's so slow that I actually had to fight off falling asleep for much of the the last third of the film.  Plus, the conclusion is so anti-climactic that you're left wondering why you bothered sitting through it all.

I'm not sure if this was an issue of the book not translating well, or maybe having to condense too much of it to fit into a movie.  There isn't even an entry for the book or author on Wikipedia, so my research is limited.  From what I can see on Amazon, the book's synopsis seems to have a much different setup than how the movie was, so perhaps too much was changed for the sake of adapting it.  It's shame because I really like Lem Dobbs as a writer, but it looks like he really misses working with Steven Soderbergh (they've done at least three films together).  I don't even think Robert Redford did that bad of a job directing, as he did a good job with the actors, and managed to make it interesting enough in the first half.

It is really well acted though.  Redford is great, as well as Julie Christie.  As hard as I am on The Beef, I actually thought he had the right blend of arrogance, mixed with an honest drive to uncover the truth.  The supporting cast is fleshed out with actors like Stephen Root, Nick Nolte, Brit Marling, Stanley Tucci, Chris Cooper, Anna Kendrick, Richard Jenkins, Sam Elliott and Brendan Gleeson.  When you have such notable actors in smaller roles, you tend to think their characters may be more significant to the actual story, and are disappointed when they aren't in it more or aren't fleshed out enough.  It's just a shame to not see these people get something meatier to work with.  It makes me wonder if Redford just called in a bunch of favors to fill out his cast, or the actors just really wanted to work with him.  Can't say I blame any of them though.

The Company You Keep is yet another well-acted film with a star studded cast, but unfortunately the story comes up way short with its slow pacing and disappointing resolution.  It's not a bad movie, but it is pretty forgettable.  I actually saw this over a week ago and forgot that I never got around to posting my review.  This is not something you need to rush out and see, and has rental written all over it.

2.5 (out of 5) Death Stars

On The Road (2012)

I have bongo music stuck in my head now...

I've never read the On the Road, nor have I ever had much of an interest in Jack Kerouac (whom the main character of Sal was based on), but I'm generally willing to give anything a shot.  The only thing I'd heard about On the Road going in was that it often considered to be a unfilmable book, and there had been several attempts to make this over the years (mainly by Francis Ford Coppola).  When I hear unfilmable book, I think of titles like Cloud Atlas or Watchmen, but the the difference with those two is that they were much more ambitious films, with many complex characters and covering longer periods of time.  Maybe something got really lost in this adaptation of On the Road, but I didn't find that to be the case here at all.

On the Road focuses on a small group of twenty-somethings over a few years in their lives from the late 40's to early 50's.  The story primarily follows the characters of Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund).  Sal is a struggling writer who yearns for more freedom, and Dean (who was already an ex-con when they meet) is a fun loving guy, who's pretty much up for anything, or anyone.  Dean is also quite the ladies man, shacking up with Marylou (Kristen Stewart) and Camille (Kirsten Dunst).  As the title suggests, they spend a lot of time on the road, meeting people, partying and having adventures.

If I was in my early 20's, still in college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, something like what you see in On the Road would be fun to experience.  However, it's not particularly interesting to watch on screen, especially as you learn more about the characters and find that there's really not much to like about them.  Maybe this is what got lost in the adaptation, but I found all of these characters to be pretty shallow, and in the case of Dean I found him to be kind of a scumbag.  He's married and has a newborn, but he'd rather go out on the road and have more drugs and sex.  His friends seems to idolize him, rather than call him out on his behavior, or maybe suggest he stay home with his family.  Would you support the antics of your friend that's a deadbeat dad?  Instead, they share long embraces each time they meet up, as if years have passed since they all last saw each other, but it's only been a few months at a time.

The lengthy feeling between meetups is likely due to the fact that On the Road is pretty slowly paced.  At one point, I checked my watch thinking the movie must be close to over only to see I was only at the one hour mark.  I still had an hour left to go!  At this point, I felt like the movie was a bit of a repeating loop, because you just see them do the same things over and over again: more driving, more sex, and more partying.  It feels routine and less interesting as it goes on.  Even when there are attempts to show you other sides of their characters you don't come away with a better understanding of them, but rather liking them less for their behavior.

That's pretty much all I got out On the Road, which I realize may be missing the point of the book, but I'm reviewing what I saw on screen, not a book I've never read or a film's faithfulness to it.  I'm just calling it like I see it.

I liked the performances for the most part, but I wonder if I would have had an easier time identifying with the characters if maybe they had gotten more familiar actors.  Kristen Stewart's not exactly a name that gets my butt in the theater.  I actually didn't mind her performance here, and thought she had some life about her for a change.  She's actually not in the movie all that much, which may be why I didn't have much of an issue with her.  I'm only seen Sam Riley in 13, and thought he was adequate.  Despite not liking Dean at all, I thought Garrett Hedlund's performance as him was strong and showed a lot of charisma.  You can see why people would initially be drawn to him.  We also get a very eclectic cast of bigger names playing very small roles.  You'll see people like Amy Adams, Terrence Howard, Elisabeth Moss, and Viggo Mortensen pop-up in random roles throughout.

It's a good looking film with lots of picturesque scenery.  As far as a period piece, it felt accurate and faithful to the time.  There's also a sense of speed when driving that you really feel, and I think that's where Walter Salles direction really came into play.  You also experience all the seasons they go through.  When you see them driving in the hot sun, you can't help but notice how sweaty and dirty they are.  I can only imagine what the inside of that car smelled like.  I hope they stopped to shower on their trips.

I was annoyed by the Beatnik, bongo music I heard throughout.  They say that Beatniks were the original hipsters, and after watching On the Road I can see how there are some similarities, and I dislike their style and music as equally as modern hipsters.  I've heard that Kerouac's book has been very influential and praised for it's style, but I don't think Jose Rivera's screenplay captured any of that.  If there was any energy to Kerouac's writing, that's all been sucked out of the film.

On the Road is a good looking, well-acted film, but for a story about living life, it sure felt lifeless.  There's no passion to it, and I didn't like any of the characters as they were portrayed.  It's way too long for what it is, and would recommend you take the two hours you could spend watching On the Road to go out and start an adventure of your own.

2 (out of 5) Death Stars