Prisoners is the story of two families, the Dovers (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello) and the Birches (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) who find their six-year-old daughters missing on Thanksgiving Day. Detective Loki, played with an easygoing authority by Jake Gyllenhall, is the man assigned to their case. The search quickly leads to Alex Jones (Paul Dano, in an appropriately creepy performance), a disturbed young man with an unsettling demeanor. When there isn’t enough evidence to keep Jones in jail while the search for the missing daughters continues, Keller takes matters into his own hands, abducting and imprisoning him in an abandoned building. Keller deploys what some might call “enhanced interrogation techniques” in an attempt to get Jones to confess the location of the young girls.   In fact, it’s tough not to see Jackman (Wolverine), Howard (the man who could have been War Machine in the Iron Man films), and Gyllenhall (who was very nearly Spider-Man) as inversions of superhero or action movie archetypes. What are the actual consequences when an ordinary person decides to take the law into his own hands? How awful is it when you hit someone in the face repeatedly? What happens when you are a cop who “has never lost a case,” but are still quite human? Especially one who is prone to mistakes and capable of getting outrun by a suspect, not in a high speed chase or with a dazzling display of parkour or martial arts, but simply through a series of suburban backyards? Terrence Howard’s Franklin Birch works as the film’s conscience, although it’s worth noting that despite his misgivings, he can’t bring himself to stop Keller. Howard plays Franklin with a wounded sincerity, and he fades appropriately into the background when necessary. Howard allows his character to be overpowered by Keller’s madness, and ultimately upstaged by Viola Davis as his wife in one particularly difficult scene. You’ll know it when you see it. There’s a political component to Prisoners, as well. The question of “how far would you go to keep your family safe” sounds, not coincidentally, like arguments used by governments to justify military action (and worse) during times of unrest. By using these two families as a microcosm of America, before pushing them to their limits, Prisoners raises the spectre of post-9/11 paranoia, and how easily we can make the wrong choices when faced with horrific circumstances beyond our control. “Someone has to make him talk, or they’re gonna die,” Dover says at one point, with a chilling, misguided rationality that has certainly been used countless times behind closed doors over the last decade or so. However, by the film’s final act, we’re safely back in Hollywood territory. A talky villain master plan reveal worthy of a Bond film mars the proceedings slightly, as does a later scene where one important plot thread is addressed (or dismissed) in passing via a newspaper headline, while another, even more important one, is simply never mentioned again after the middle of the movie. Were the first half of Prisoners not so daring, these sins might be unforgivable. As it stands, they’re minor disappointments.