The Tortured
Starring Erika Christensen, Jesse Metcalf, Bill Moseley, Bill Lippincott
Directed by Robert Lieberman
Elise (Erika Christensen) and Craig's (Jesse Metcalf) five year old son gets abducted from their front yard by serial killer John Kozlowski (Bill Moseley). The child is eventually killed and Kozlowski is sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
This doesn't sit well with the couple, who wish to see the man dead, so they hatch a plan to kidnap him and take him to an abandoned cabin deep in the woods, and extract their own brand of justice - with extreme pain and torture.
It all leads up to a "shocking twist" that seems more added on than anything, and leaves the ending with a ton of plot holes and stuff that makes no sense.
The concept of the film is an intriguing one, basically because it's something that could happen in real life. Unfortunately, children all the time are abducted and killed, and I feel that in that sense the film did a great job in showing the grief of the parents, especially Erika Christensen's performance.
Unfortunately, it delves then into the "Saw" style torture porn, in which the parents brutally torture the man they think is responsible for their son's death, and the emotional depth of the beginning gets drowned out by typical good cop-bad cop routines, both of the parents feeling bad at different times, and needless gratuitous violence.
As I said earlier, the ending is a twist to it that I'm sure the writers thought was pure genius, but it destroys the point of the film and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.
Rating: C
Comments
Post a Comment