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| Warner Bros. |
At first, I was hesitant about whether or not Prisoners was going to be good or something I wanted to see. The trailers made it clear that the cast is going for Oscar nominations and promised a lot of intense, dark drama. Basically everything that an Oscar-bait movie tries to encompass which generally turns me off. On top of that, you have a topic like child abduction. A topic like that ranks among very few others in film that tend to try and shock and disturb audiences rather than construct a meaningful reason for delving into such a topic in the first place. Movies like Changeling and Gone Baby Gone have done it before, and even though Gone Baby Gone was a wonderfully directed and written film, it still felt unnecessarily heavy and dark. Other topics such as the Holocaust, war, etc, fall into the same category. Exploring these topics can quickly turn into a sort of exploitation and can be an easy way to create buzz around your film and gives actors a chance to show how distraught they can appear on screen.
But then again, a cast of Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terrence Howard, Paul Dano, Viola Davis, Melissa Leo, and Maria Bello is super solid. Not to mention director Denis Villeneuve proved he could handle some very disturbing/intense content in the Oscar nominated foreign film, Incendies. And then Prisoners started getting positive early buzz from festivals, so I figured I better see it.
