This movie moves from unintentionally hilarious, to boring, to kind of bad.
I wasn’t expecting much. It didn’t sound very good, but it sounded like they might be able to do some interesting stuff with the premise. The movie kicks off immediately after the kid is kidnapped. That’s okay. Then we get a brief scene of the mother flipping out after she comes home and finds out that the police are looking into the kidnapping. Her reaction is ridiculous. It’s overly dramatic, and she doesn’t listen to the police. Then we get the police finding the house, finding the kid, the parents going to the morgue to identify the body. Then the movie goes back, and walks through the scene where the kid is kidnapped? This is the weirdest step I’ve seen. We didn’t learn anything new from the flashback. The movie established that we shouldn’t be interested in that part of the story. So this exists to fill time.
Throughout the first act, the parents are hilarious. They overact in response to everything. There’s even a scene where they yell at their lawyer when the lawyer explains the sentencing available for the crimes.
Which brings further, massive plot problems. Not ones that I felt were reasonable, just things that reflected a lack of research.
So, the villain is on trial. We hear that there are two counts of most of the crimes… but the trial only focuses on his kidnapping, torture, and murder of this single child. We get police testimony that there’s a mass grave. Wouldn’t the police actually look into this? If the state is bringing charges against this guy for murders, you don’t prosecute each one separately. Then he gets a weaker sentence so that they can learn more about the remains? They specifically say that their goal is to find where the other bodies are. So either there’s more than one mass grave… or these are incompetent cops.
There’s a jury in this case. And somehow, the efforts at cooperation in exchange for lighter sentencing still applies? Typically, that kind of trade-off happens when the state decides which charges will be brought against the defendant.
The most interesting portion of the movie is the mid-section, and it’s because the parents decide to kidnap the killer. The logistics of this operation are much more interesting than anything else the movie has to offer.
Then we move into the torture stuff. The characters change up. They are conflicted about what they’re doing, and so forth.
There’s a bit of twist ending, but it seems much more forced. Who cares?
The most interesting thing about this is how much it made me appreciate an episode of Masters of Horror - Family. A vaguely similar story, but told in a far more interesting way, with much more comprehensive development.
Maybe the shortest way to describe the problem with the movie is that the main characters never have a chance to be reasonable or clever. They argue with everyone and each other, and never get a chance to improve.
And the non-linear editing is like a kid with a new toy.
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