The Big Picture

Hugh Jackman’s performance in
Prisoners
showcases a more grounded and compelling anger, questioning morality in a dark reality.

Prisoners’
success highlights the impact of movie star performances, elevating original films like this dramatic thriller.
Hugh Jackman’s powerful and dramatic turn in
Prisoners
proves to be the heart and soul of the unrelenting labyrinth of the film.

This summer, Hugh Jackman is set to return to his most prolific role in Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine. This will be his 10th appearance as Logan, making Wolverine handily the most iconic performance of his career. However, Jackman’s best acting role exists outside any cinematic universe, in a 2013 film directed by Dune: Part Two’s Denis Villeneuve, Prisoners. Prisoners follows Jackman as Keller Dover, a man taking justice into his own hands after his six-year-old daughter was kidnapped near their home, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Detective Loki, a dedicated detective who is trying to solve the case while keeping Dover from making any rash decisions that could jeopardize the investigation.

The film was a critical and commercial success, garnering acclaim for Villeneuve’s cryptic, haunting direction and the lead performances. The two-hander sees Jackman and Gyllenhaal at odds, with the former tapping into the devastation of losing a child and the latter wearing all the world-weariness of his macabre career in a wired, exhausted performance. It is a major achievement for both Villeneuve and the two lead actors, a cryptic and disturbing drama that questions how far a person would go to do what they perceive to be the right thing, even if it requires making many difficult, dangerous decisions.

Prisoners When Keller Dover’s daughter and her friend go missing, he takes matters into his own hands as the police pursue multiple leads and the pressure mounts.Director Denis Villeneuve Runtime 153 Writers Aaron Guzikowski Studio Warner Bros. Pictures Tagline Every moment matters.

What Makes Hugh Jackman’s ‘Prisoners’ Performance Stand Out?
Jackman has always played rage incredibly well. You see that come through in each of his appearances as Wolverine, especially in James Mangold’s Logan. But the ferocity of Keller Dover, a desperate man who feels as though he truly has nothing to lose in the pursuit of retrieving his child, brings an even more grounded and compelling anger out of Jackman which is equal parts sympathetic and terrifying.

Dover is losing his faith in every system and facet of his life in the midst of a hopeless situation, and it drives him to a position where he begins to question his own sense of morality. Dover ends up kidnapping a suspect who was thought to be involved in his child’s abduction but released due to a lack of evidence, a developmentally disabled man portrayed by Paul Dano, and tortures him in an abandoned home in an effort to find out where his child has been taken.

Jackman goes into the depths of Dover’s psyche as this crisis of faith and morality plays out, swinging back and forth between primal rage and exhausted despair. In one of the most quietly devastating scenes, Dover sits across Loki and looks through photographs of recovered, bloody children’s clothes (thankfully, later revealed to be a red herring, clothes covered in pig blood). He recognizes one clothing item, believes his child may be dead, and softly points at the photo and says “you let this happen,” before getting up and leaving. This scene plays incredibly heavily, and in stark contrast to the furious nature of many of Jackman’s other big moments in the film. Seeing someone we expect to kick into hero mode or scream with such force that the room would shake instead feel utterly hollow and defeated in the face of an unimaginable tragedy makes for one of the most powerful moments Jackman has ever played on screen.

Jackman is an actor known for his theatricality. He began his career on the stage, and since then, many of his iconic performances have involved a sense of heightened reality. Whether he is singing in a circus-set musical, performing reality-defying magic tricks in The Prestige, or slashing through Sentinels in an X-Men movie, Jackman tends to play characters living fairly spectacular lives, and doing spectacular things. Prisoners is a movie which places him square in the middle of a dark, cold reality where nothing is extravagant, everything is deeply muted. Jackman reigns it in appropriately, matching the tone of the film and giving a performance that does feel incredibly lived-in.

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‘Prisoners’ Feels Like a Product of a Bygone Era

While the industry has shifted away from the movie star model in favor of intellectual property being the driving force behind a movie’s draw, the success of movies like Prisoners is proof of how much higher a great, original film can soar on the shoulders of movie star performances. Gyllenhaal and Jackman elevate nearly every project they are a part of, and putting the two of them together on screen is a guarantee that a movie will at least manage to have solid acting. The two of them, operating at their peaks, are able to take a mid-budget, adult-oriented, nearly three-hour-long dramatic thriller, and turn it into a $122 million dollar-grossing movie.

This kind of thing does not happen as often now as it did in decades past, when a movie like David Fincher’s Se7en, even more disturbed and made on an even smaller budget, could turn into a massive sensation. Despite Prisoners being just over a decade old, it feels like even in the past 11 years, things have changed radically. A weighty, thematically dark, mature original story like Prisoners feels much more like fodder for a prestige TV miniseries in the 2020s, while these kinds of stories used to attract major stars and end up being big box office draws in addition to garnering critical or awards acclaim.

Hugh Jackman has not leveraged his stardom for many films outside the Marvel sphere in the last few years, with the exception of something like The Greatest Showman, which was a sensation in its own right. But this means we’ve sorely missed him giving more performances like his incredible dramatic turn in this masterpiece. While it is a major success in nearly every regard, Jackman’s performance is the powerful heart and soul at the center of the dark, unrelenting labyrinth that is Prisoners.

Prisoners is available to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S.

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