If you've not yet seen The Hunt yet then
cancel everything and get the fuck to it! It's a genius slab of drama that
focuses on the trauma an adult can suffer when accused of introducing a child
to his fleshy man-dick. I know the film has been out a little while but due to
life’s incessant bullshit, I'd somehow unknowingly avoided it for far too long…
however like the irregular schedule of the bastard bus, you wait forever for
one pedo-film and then two come along at once. Only a couple of weeks after
buzzing off The Hunt, I recently caught up with the pervert-tacular
Prisoners. Both films take place during a holiday, begin with a deer hunt
and feature the fucktarded consequences of spontaneous vigilantism. The
difference between the two is that in The Hunt you know that the accused
is innocent of his crime. Prisoners on the other hand is a bit more of a
kiddy-fucking free for all.
Prisoners tells
the story of two families whose Thanksgiving is ruined when they misplace their
daughters like a set of shitty car keys. Luckily though there was a greasy
looking critter parked outside their house all that day in a large pedo-mobile
who probably knows where they are. One of the missing girls’ dads, played by
Hugh Jackman, therefore makes the logical decision to kidnap the oddball and
punch the living shite out of him until he talks. I guess he just figured that
the chap would be more likely to co-operate if choking on his own teeth and
being screamed at by fucking Wolverine. Meanwhile, detective Donnie
Darko is on his own mission to find the girls and uncovers so many more
pedo-ish suspects that the area starts to resemble a holiday camp for retired
BBC presenters. The plot set-up then is simply that there are several potential
kidnappers with Jackman's character already having picked his 'molester du jour’
before even glancing at the full menu. What plays out is therefore just a
classic game of nonce-roulette in which you take one of several local creeps,
crack open their head and then hope to fuck that you had the right one.
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| You've got to love There's Something About Mary... |
On the bright side, there's no doubting
that Prisoners is a good film. In fact for the first two-thirds there's
an enjoyably suffocating Zodiac-esque feel to the thing as it attempts
to establish itself as being both sombre and weighty. Helping this is of course
the predictably brilliant acting in which Wolverine and Donnie
Darko do their best to inflate their unblinking eyes to blood-shot and
bulbous levels of intensity and anguish. Nothing hammers home the serious intentions
of a film more than having your two leads stare so hard that their face veins
explode in a way that only naturally occurs during anal rape. Although both men
are indisputably impressive throughout, I think that for me I was perhaps most
impressed by Gyllenhaal. I guess that you kind of expect intensity from Jackman
because he's most famous for playing an angry twat with knives up his hands, however
Gyllenhaal has had to fight to be taken seriously as an adult against the curse
of his annoyingly handsome but boyishly dopey face. Here though he manages to
believably play a demented detective so successfully that I almost didn't mind
the odd haircut that made it look as though he was being scalp fucked by a
tattered doormat.
If they're on one side though then I
suppose we should also have a little look at their rivals over on Team Nonce.
Sadly though, I kind of think that this is one of the areas that the film kind
of lets itself down in as it lazily just reaches into the big bag of pervert clichés.
Paul Dano plays one of the twitchy suspects and don't get me wrong- he is as amazing here as he usually is in
terms of immersing himself in the role. I don't know what it is about Dano
considering I know nothing about his real life but for some reason I really
think me and him could one day be friends. Although that might just be because
of his mute performance in Little Miss Sunshine and my desire to know
somebody who literally has no choice but to listen to my everlasting drivel…
However as great a performance as it is, his character couldn't be more
classically pedo if he walked around with his cock disguised as a new born
puppy. As the other suspects show up they too all have a look about them that's
so sinister that you'd be forgiven for an involuntary scream of “FUCK OFF,
CREEPER” if you passed them in the street. Films like Hard Candy and The
Woodsman went someway to showing that the most dangerous thing about a sex
offender is that they don't necessarily look like monsters. They could be
anybody, anywhere and at any time, but here with their greasy hair, twitchy
energy, bullet proof glasses and the pin-prick, tiny eyes of shrew, they
couldn't be anything fucking else.
The other festering cock of a problem is
pretty much the entire third act which, in my opinion, kind of undermines
everything that had been done over the previous two arse-numbing hours. Like I
said, the film has a moodiness to it that suggests a degree of realism and
importance however the concluding third just goes a bit fucking mental. I won't
spoil the details but it's like the plot slips over and accidental falls tit
first into the boring world of the bog-standard thriller- the kind where some
dick of a main character starts acting like the worlds thickest plank and walks
gormlessly into the gaping, toothy snatch of the villain. Real life is both
dull and as predictable as fuck and does not contain as many twists as this
story attempts to suggest. If a little girl goes missing then the odds are
she's dead- killed by either the school caretaker or her pervy uncle. What
starts off as a downbeat, gritty depiction of child abduction concludes with so
many bullshit 'surprises' that it's like a weird pedo-sequel to Ocean's
Eleven. It's a shame too because everything starts off pretty great, it's
just that when it comes time to explaining itself, it kind of starts to fuck
up. Maybe if they'd gone for the gothic horror of Silence of the Lambs, the
conclusion would have rang slightly more believable. It's like that moment when
you ask somebody who’s lying a question and suddenly they get stumped and
splutter out some panicked bollocks that sounds so much shitter than the
previously prepared story of crap.
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| Anyone who uses a Blue Shell is a dick. |
Still the whole thing is still pretty
enjoyable for the most part. It's just such a shame that for a film that's
about two and half hours long the story still seems to have bigger, gaping
holes than an eighty year old whore. If they could just re-write the end and
then squeeze the bagginess out of it then I think you'd end up with a movie
worthy of its performances. Although, to give credit where it's due in regards
to the end, there is a pretty cool high-speed car scene in the middle of heavy
snow as the driver's head-wound gushes blood into their eyes. The film was lit
by a cinematographer named Roger Deakins whose work, for those who don't know,
is the human equivalent of having your eye gauged out by a golden paintbrush.
Everything he works on has his unmistakable stamp of beauty on it and this is
no exception. However this speeding car scene near the end is almost painful in
its artistic genius. With the snow, the blood and the passing neon signs,
there's so much colour being seared into our retinas that everything starts to
look like Mario Kart’s
Rainbow Road if it had been designed by a psychopath.
Prisoners is
a good film that's just nowhere near perfect. If you have a few spare hours and
there's nothing else to do then I recommend you give it a go. On the other hand though, The Hunt almost
is perfect and as I said at the start, you should go check that out before it's
too late and we're all dead. They're both very enjoyable but if you only get
chance to relax to one film about child abuse this year then really, it isn't a
hard decision as to which you should go for. I don't regret having paid to
watch Prisoners at all but if I'm honest I don't think I'd pay to
own it on DVD. If however I was lucky enough to trip over the frozen corpse of
a rotten tramp and he had a copy of it in his lethally chilled begging-claw
then I would be more than happy to steal it from him and I'd appreciate the
repeat viewing. But only under those circumstances.
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