The Tortured
IMDB rate: 5,5
Genre: Torture
It was definitely not a big surprise what subject this movie was about. It's really nothing more or less than torturing someone. I must admit that I was a tiny bit surprised by the ending of this movie, but overall I wasn't too impressed with it.
In Rutland Country, the six year-old Benjamin Landry is kidnapped by a psychopath in the lawn of his house. His father Craig Landry unsuccessfully runs after the truck but the abductor escapes. Sooner the police discovers that John Kozlowski had abducted and killed Benjamin. When the criminal is sentenced to 25 years in prison only, Benjamin's mother Elise Landry presses her husband to kidnap John and torture him. Craig is a doctor and knows exactly how to inflict pain to the psychopath. They succeed to kidnap John from the prison transport, but Craig has an accident and John is hurt. The couple tortures the man until they find the truth about their victim.
The movie pays a lot of attention to the connection between the family members and how the parents are feeling after the murder of their son. I think this is a very important part for a movie in general because often you miss the connection between family members because of bad writing and stuff, but in this movie they really made sure that you knew how the parents felt about this.
The first third of this movie is mostly flashbacks to their kid and the moment he was kidnapped. I expected that there would be paid a lot more build-up to the moment he was kidnapped, but it literally happens when the movie starts so I thought that was something nice. The second part of the film is about how the parents kidnap the murderer and from there on it's basically just torturing.
I think the movie would've been better if it was a drama movie and just showed a story about the parents coping with the loss of their child. The beginning is really good, even the part of the kidnapping of the criminal is reasonably good, but when the torturing starts it just becomes slightly boring. The dialogues are getting weird and well, it's really just twenty different ways of torturing a guy. When you're watching the movie it feels like someone took over the movie halfway through and just turned it into a horror themed movie.
The acting is pretty decent. The parents are being played by Jesse Metcalfe (John Tucker Must Die, Desperate Housewives) and Erika Christensen (Parenthood, Flightplan). They're both OK I think. The criminal is played by horror actor Bill Moseley, not a big part but impressive nonetheless. Their characters were written quite good I think, you know that the mother will blame her husband for losing their son even though it's not his fault, but even she admits after that that she can't help blaming him. I get that, you want to blame someone and he would be the obvious person to blame, their marriage failure after that was shown very quickly, but very effective as well. The dialogues were good until the torturing began, from that moment on the dialogues became kinda lame.
The runtime is only 79 minutes, but I think that's a good thing. Torturing someone in a basement can only be entertaining for so long. If the movie was longer you will be bored very easily with this movie I think.
The Tortured is not very original but it's not a bad movie. The acting is good and the plot is nice as well. When the torturing starts it does become a bit boring but there's a small plot twist at the end which did surprise me quite a bit. It was a good plot twist that made the movie slightly better. It's just a movie that I enjoyed watching for one time.
My personal rate: 6/10
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