Hugh Jackman heads up a stellar cast in a film that abandons its intellectual pursuits in favor?to pursue the?mass audience. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

The current economics of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking are simple: Explosions, appeal to 14 to 29-year-olds and, best of all, minimal need for translation ensures a $100 million budget. Anything else is a "hard sell" in cash cow overseas markets. So when a thought-provoking, morally complex adult drama (no hyphen) comes along we can rejoice. Similarly, when that same thought-provoking adult drama feels compelled to dumb itself down in pursuit of the Big Action Moment,to make it a more saleable hyphenate, we want to put a chopstick in the director's eye.

Such is the case with Denis Villeneuve'sPrisoners, a grim, challenging story about two little girlswhogo missing on Thanksgiving and thesubsequentfalloutfromtheir abduction. The film starts with some sleight of hand, in that Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman, not relaying on his biceps) is out hunting with his oldest son, lecturing him on the cycle of nature, morality, responsibility and so on. On the drive home, a crucifix dangles prominently from the rearview mirror. Clearly,Keller is one of those anti-government, fundamentalistChristian, survivalist types.Then he, his wife Grace (Maria Bello) and their kids walk down their suburban Pennsylvania road and join Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) for the holiday meal. It's a perfect picture of Obama-era racial harmony and ideological tolerance. Then, on the way back to the Dovers' house unsupervised, their young daughters are abducted. When the prime suspect, the childlike Alex Jones (Paul Dano) is released for lack of evidence, Keller takes it upon himself to make Alex talk.

Prisonersis the natural evolution of the vigilante sub-genre, a story that takes the natural intellectual leap from the robotic Charles Bronson model to a modern, cajoling avenger who does, in fact, understand his actions. For 90 minutes we watch Keller fall deeper and deeper into a moral abyss fuelled by grief, righteousness and certitude, and then drag the Birches with him. So positive are they that the police, led by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), are ineffective, and so sure that Alex is simply psychopathic as opposed to terrified and perhaps mentally challenged,that it doesn't so much blind them all to what they're doing, but rather serves as a crutch that justifies it.Prisonersoften walks on shaky moral ground, but that's its point.

But then the engaging morality play takes a misguided and unnecessary turn that not only hijacks the film's tone, it detaches the ideas that Villeneuve and writer Aaron Guzikowski worked so hard to cultivate, settling on tired, backwards and safe tropes for its denouement. Admittedly,Villeneuve leans to melodrama - hisIncendieswas timely and provocative but also vaguely hysterical - but 40 minutes of "saleable" action could have been excised andPrisonerswould have been a stronger film. Jackman and Gyllenhaal are as nuanced as they've ever been (Loki's constant blinking isagreat character tic) and though Davis and Howard aren't given enough to do, they both make the fear, frustration and pain of a parent with a missing child,andtheirmoral resignation to their actions, vivid. They get great help from Roger Deakins, hands down one of the industry's finest working cinematographers,(most Coen brothers films, The Assassination of Jesse James,Skyfall), who makes peachy Georgia pass for oppressive, industrial Pennsylvania.Prisoners' rating has more to do with how it starts and what it aspired to rather than what it ultimately became.

Prisonersopened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

(HK Edition 11/01/2013 page7)