PRISONER'S DAUGHTER - Mark Reviews Movies

Prisoner's Daughter, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 29, 2023

There very well might be a worthwhile story to found in Prisoner's Daughter, which follows a reformed convict, his adult daughter, and her son as they try to fix broken bonds and form new ones. Such a story, though, would need to be grounded in matters more convincing and less formulaic than the ones presented by Mark Bacci's screenplay. Little about director Catherine Hardwicke's movie, save for a few performances, feels authentic in any notable way.

The convict is Max (Brian Cox), an older (but not too old, lest the casting look off—leading the makeup department to dye Cox's hair) prisoner who's serving a sentence of unspecified—but considerable, apparently—length for an unspecified—but what also must be considerable—crime. Bacci is very hesitant to give us too much information about what Max might have done to land him in prison multiple times.

That would be a somewhat noble, sympathetic goal—if not for the fact that so much of the drama here revolves around what a terrible man Max has been and what potential violence he is capable of enacting. The approach here feels like a dishonest, manipulative attempt to ensure as much sympathy for the character, who was involved with gangsters and likely killed some people, as possible.

The little we do learn about Max—beyond the fact that he once was awful in a general way but has since sought and achieved sobriety, as well as a new perspective, during his current prison sentence—is that he is terminally ill. He has pancreatic cancer of the final stage of severity, and after the prison doctor gives him a prognosis of having about six months left, Max is given an opportunity to live out the rest of his time under house arrest. As long as his estranged daughter will agree to allow him to live with her, that is.

She's Maxine (Kate Beckinsale), a struggling single mother to Ezra (Christopher Convery). Trying to hold down a few jobs around Las Vegas as a server and working behind-the-scenes at some casino shows, Maxine is behind on mortgage payments and can't keep up with other costs, including medication to treat Ezra's epilepsy.

Yes, his condition does come into play as part of the story and is basically treated as a cheap time bomb waiting to blast yet another complication into the characters' troubled lives. The same goes for Maxine's ex-husband and the boy's father Tyler (Tyson Ritter), who doesn't provide any help—financial, emotional, or otherwise—to the two, because he's too busy using drugs and still trying to make it as a drummer. The guy's a loser or worse, which is broadly believable enough—albeit a bit hypocritical, in light of the generous treatment of the reformation of Max's character, and entirely contrived, since the character's attitude and escalating behavior are treated as a plot device.

The rest of the story almost doesn't need to be explained, as Maxine, who reluctantly agrees to let Max live with her for the money he can provide, gradually overcomes her negative feelings toward her formerly abusive and consistently absent father. Meanwhile Ezra gets advice on how to deal with bullies—including one with a knife—at school.

One could argue that the latter storyline, which has Max teaching his grandson to fight and enlisting the aid of his gym-owning friend Hank (Ernie Hudson) to teach the kid to box, is further evidence of some inherent hypocrisies in the movie. After a while, though, it seems to be asking a bit too much for some thematic foundation or consistency in a tale that's more and more about the melodrama of its scenario than anything else. The too-pat climax, in which all of the story's pieces—from those conveniently adaptable characters to a last-minute choice about whether or not violence is an answer—line up just so, is unearned and kind of grating as a result.

On the positive side of Prisoner's Daughter, Cox brings his usual gravitas, being equally a man filled with considered regret and the shadow of an intimidating figure, to a role that might have deserved it under other circumstances. Beckinsale, too, does what she can to make a character who's fully defined by all of the circumstances surrounding her convincing, but Maxine's final speech, which comes a little too close for comfort in almost forcing the title into the monologue, epitomizes the hokey material the actor is dealing with here. The existence of a big speech that sums up everything the movie wants us to learn, by the way, should speak volumes.

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