Krishna
This movie has its moments. It keeps your interest until the end, and has some twists and turns that may surprise some of you – maybe not all of you. And Hugh Jackman has done a phenomenal job of portraying a father totally desperate about his missing daughter and, at the same time, excessively angry that the police are letting go the obviously crazy killer due to lack of some evidence.
The bull dog like detective who does not let go once he gets a bite on some case has been done before but still Jake Gyllenhaal does a credible job of portraying that character. Just a question – does the nervous tick that he does in the movie been done by him in another movie recently? I had a sense of Déjà Vu while watching but cannot swear to it.
Enough about my impressions; let us talk about the story. There are two families who are close friends. One family consists of Mr and Mrs Dover. The husband, Keller (played by Hugh Jackman) is a deeply religious man with a strong sense of right and wrong. The other family are the Birches. The Dovers have the Hollywood mandated two kids, Ralph the elder and Anna, the six year old. The Birches have two kids too, Eliza and Joy who is also six. Ralph and Eliza are of similar age but older.
On a Thanksgiving day, the Dovers with their kids to the Birches for dinner and the kids go for a walk. They go early, and the kids go for a walk when they see an RV parked there, with no lights. A highly unusual sight, but then they move on. Later, the younger kids Anna and Joy go back to the Dover house to get a safety whistle that the security minded Keller always insists that his kids carry. They never return and the older children, who are watching TV in the Dover house later claim that they saw no one.
Keller is highly suspicious of the RV and wants the police to find it. The detective who heads the investigation, a highly committed and intelligent – another Hollywood standard – Loki promises to find. When the RV is found soon, the driver tries to flee and crashes the car. The only problem is this; the driver, Alex Jones, is mentally deficient and has the IQ of an eight year old. Which is why, when the investigators check the van fully and do not find an evidence, and when he denies ever seeing the missing children and the polygraph test are also inconclusive, Loki has to let him go. While he is leaving, he is confronted by an angry Kenneth and says, just so that he could hear ‘They were crying only when I left them’. No one else hears this and Kenneth is not believed. Alex is being brought up by his uncle
Frustrated that the killer was clean getting away, Kenneth kidnaps him at gunpoint and decides to imprison him and interrogate the killer himself.
The story then develops into a cat and mouse game between the detective and Kenneth. When Kenneth decides to let in Franklin Birch, the father of Joy into confidence, he feels qualms about going outside the law. When Kenneth gets no results from mild interrogation, he ups the ante in torture in frustration and the game becomes really serious.
There is a side story of a priest finding a serial killer of children confessing to him and he, unable to bear it in his conscience, decides to kill the man, a deranged man who is suspected of killing the kids by the police who keeps drawing a maze compulsively and also keeps snakes in suitcases, and a twist about who the real killer is. ,
Detective Loki is a typical movie detective, motivated, frustrated by lack of results, under pressure from his superiors to produce results. The only difference is his volatile temper, which makes him shout at his superiors and who tolerate it presumably because he is such an effective cop.
Apart from some contrived twists, the one piece of absurdity that takes the cake is this. When he finds the real killer and in a gun battle that ensues, manages to kill the real killer, he find himself injured and with a child who is dying of poison. Now, a real or even a semi sensible cop would have called for an ambulance or for airlifting of the child to immediate medical attention. But this movie cop has to insanely decide to drive her to the emergency himself, going at top speed and sometimes on the wrong side of the road. In case you did not think it was challenging enough – and don’t even get me started about the possibility of crashing this car at a critical juncture – he cannot see because blood is pouring in front of his eyes and he is semi blind and has to wipe it off. Now come on, even for a movie exaggeration, there has to be some limit!
The ending where Kenneth is trapped and how the detective finds him is interesting, and ties in with the story.
An interesting movie. Great performance by Hugh Jackman, really. But a great movie? Not really. Worth a look if you feel the need to be entertained.
I would say a 5/10
– – Krishna