Prisoners - Crime-by-numbers

If you found a box that said 'well-executed crime thriller' on it, and pulled out a reel of film, it would probably be a copy of Prisoners.  Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a father who's daughter has vanished, presumed kidnapped by local weirdo Alex Jones.  Jake Gyllenhaal is the police officer who is on the case, on one hand trying to find the girls, and on the other hand trying to stop Dover from taking justice into his own hands.  Dover though, is a bit of a gun nut.  One of those self-sufficient nuclear-apocalypse-preparing-for oddballs who exist in the states, so when the law turn up and tell him to get off Jones' case, he isn't going to listen.

So this is all pretty generic stuff.  We've got a classic case of child abduction that everyone assumes the weird paedo-looking guy is responsible for.  We've got a gung-ho father taking the law into his own hands.  We've got the classic law versus vigilante thing happening.  We've got a twist at the end and a nice moral comeuppance to round things off.  We even have the tiniest sliver of an open ending.  I'm not trying to say that there's anything wrong with Prisoners for being a little generic, just pointing out that it isn't really doing anything new.

In fact, beyond that I don't think there's anything to criticise.  There are a few holes you could pick once you realise the twist, the stuff about DNA evidence just after the kidnapping doesn't make any sense for example, but overall its characters are ok, it's solid on a scene-to-scene basis and sets up interesting moral dilemmas.  For a film like this, it's basically about the twist, deceiving the audience and misleading them into making a few assumptions too many and then breaking the reveal at a suitable point late on in the final act.  And in that sense, Prisoners is absolutely solid.  Unremarkable, but solid.