Logging

Film:  Prisoners

A good but not great film.  Quite a lot of tension and chills.  I'm disposed to like these kind of mysteries.  People are all talking about Hugh Jackman's rageful performance and he is good, but performance-wise, I was most impressed with Gyllenhaal.  I'm not sure I've liked him in any movie since Donnie Darko.  He was the one sore spot in Zodiac.  But he tries something different in this film and I thought it worked.  Plus, the calm detective is a tougher role to bring emotion to than the raging father.

Not that it ruins the movie, but I knew basically what had happened around the midpoint, the result of seeing too many mysteries.  I can claim credit for also predicting the Killing season 3 and the two major twists in Top of the Lake.  My fiance is impressed, anyway.  (The Secrets in their Eyes is a recent mystery I didn't see coming).  Still, the ultimate resolution of the crime and the "why" of the crime was not as satisfying as the great films of this genre.  And the movie is overly long.  I wasn't sitting in my seat hoping it would end, but the steam started to come out right around the 4th act (yes, there are 4-5 acts).  Gyllenhaal's 3rd act realization was a tad hackneyed, a version of putting a glass over a picture in order to focus-in, the type of happenstance that only would happen in movies.

But these are minor quibbles.  I wish this movie well because I'd love it if there were more like it.

My final note is that Silence of the Lambs set the bar so high for the mystery thriller, it has almost ruined the genre.  I'm almost not sure where the genre can go.  The most interesting post-Lambs serial killer film is Zodiac, but that film is more a procedural and the impact of the crimes on the people involved and less about the "why" or "who" of the crime.  Se7en was a bit hit and a good film, but I'd call it an anomaly.  Se7en is so close to being a terrible movie, it really is a miracle it works.