Prisoners Reviews

A frustrating puzzle in which the pieces don't quite fit together

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Aspects of "Prisoners" are effective, but for the most part it's rather ridiculous (despite the fact that it clearly wants to be taken super-seriously), and there's an overwrought quality to much of the acting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Dark subject matter like this feels that much more perverse when it's totally phony.

Full Review | Original Score: C-

Has the sheen of a prestige picture and the guts of Law & Order's best episode.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10

Nothing more than a cheap thriller with some pseudo-philosophical nonsense tacked on.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

The directorial instincts of Villeneuve lean toward the lurid, though he seems to think he's making a grand and brooding statement about the human condition. Prisoners is a compelling but unpleasant film, captive to its own schlocky hubris.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Prisoners is like a hyper kid got on an elevator and pushed all the buttons, so that it stopped at every floor.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.0/5

Great acting, in the service of a plot that keeps getting more ridiculous. I was with it until the snakes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Prisoners wants to be operatic and epic. It never quite succeeds.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Begins as a story that has intriguing and seriously complex moral and ethical implications before giving way to what is a fairly by-the-numbers, beat-the-clock serial-killer thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Too much of brilliantly good thing. It's like watching the director's cut that goes a bit deeper into the character development and filled with scenes the filmmakers loved, but realized weren't essential for the final cut.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

It's got lofty aspirations but it also wants to wallow in the muck - to thrill you and sicken you in equal measure while also being About Something.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Swims in the murky waters of moral complexity, content to skim the surface without engaging fully with the questions it raises...delivers a disappointingly convoluted mystery plot in an attempt to give the audience what it thinks it wants.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Prisoners has got more pedigree than a Westminster dog-show winner. It's just not very good. In fact, it's worse than not-very-good; it's could've-been-really-good-and-isn't.

Full Review

You never sense that any of the players is inhabiting a character. Instead they seem to be dispiritedly reading lines off of an internal teleprompter ...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

It's preposterous schlock masquerading as art.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

... when Dover's efforts reach a sadistic level the film's flaws become more noticeable. It feels like Villeneuve stretches out nearly every scene ...

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5

Prisoners is cruel and unusual punishment.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

The film is both better than you might imagine - in a doolally sort of way - and more trivial, for all its smog-like aura of utter, unremitting despair.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4