Director Catherine Hardwicke knows how to shoot an independent film. Her roots began with the wildly descriptive look at modern teenagers in Thirteen before moving to skateboarding and Southern California surf culture in Lords of Dogtown. She rode the wave of commercial filmmaking with her stint directing Twilight before returning to familiar territory in recent years. Her latest effort, Prisoner's Daughter, is a peek into a complicated father-daughter relationship that seeks atonement in every breath. It simply doesn't deliver what it aims to accomplish from the first frame.
Prisoner's Daughter stars Brian Cox (who plays Logan Roy in HBO's drama Succession)as Max, a former criminal turned redeemed prisoner. Max has pancreatic cancer and is told by the warden of his Las Vegas penitentiary that he can live out his dying days under house arrest. He is compassionately released to his estranged daughter Maxine (Kate Beckinsale), a single mother raising her epileptic son Ezra (Christopher Convery), and who is contending with being in debt up to her eyeballs. Maxine is known for not being able to hold down a job in the service industry while battling with her ex (Tyson Ritter) about his refusal to get clean from drugs. Max is walking into a minefield and doesn't even know it.
Maxine, ashamed of her father's past, tells Ezra he is a family friend she hasn't spoken to in years, but her son has doubts. Max immediately attempts to make amends with his adult daughter, giving her money to stay at the house they grew up in to pay the mortgage and Ezra's epilepsy medication. Maxine takes the money out of desperation despite her willingness to hold onto her principles. She asks Max to go along with her lie to Ezra about his true identity. He agrees, but not before he can start construction on an apartment attached to the house so that Maxine can rent it out after he passes away.
It is apparent from the beginning of Prisoner's Daughter that Max used to be a bad, bad man. He was a former professional boxer turned Las Vegas hitman, specializing in beating people up for a living. Business was good until he got caught and was sent to prison for decades. Meanwhile, Maxine had the tough job of growing up too fast alongside an alcoholic mother, keeping the house in order, and later raising her son to exhibit every trait other than what she was raised around. When Max comes to live with his family, the old adage becomes a striking reality: You can take the man out of prison, but you can't take the prison out of the man.
Prisoner's Daughter does what it can to tug at the heartstrings while telling a complex story of redemption. Because redemption is all Max and Maxine strive for in his melodramatic story of familial relationships gone wrong. Max's past actions have consequences for his daughter's present life, and Cox's embodiment of Max offers a semi-realistic portrayal of a convict trying to make things right. However, while Cox and Beckinsale deliver raw and emotional performances, Mark Bacci's dialogue and screenplay fail to carry out a story worth the price of admission. Convery's Ezra is a bland representation of a child getting bullied in school, while his determination to connect with his loser of a father becomes repetitive. Even the subplot between Max, Ezra, and Max's old boxing buddy (Ernie Hudson) is contrived.
Viewers are already dealing with the tension between Max and his daughter while splitting screen time with a son attempting his own form of redemption geared towards those who have picked on him at school for an illness he can't control. Did the audience need a drug-addicted ex-boyfriend entering the scene and a kidnapping sequence going awry? With a dying Max regretting how his daughter turned out, that should've been the film's focus. Instead, viewers are treated to a plethora of side characters who bring nothing to the central meaning of Prisoner's Daughter, all while the art of defending oneself gets lost in the shuffle.
Prisoner's Daughter may boast a stellar cast, but the movie is fraught with anxious and unrealistic characters, a terribly misaligned script, and a redemption story that hangs on by a fraying thread. Catherine Hardwicke's latest independent feature heads into troubling waters where her characters are tasked with sinking or swimming. Unfortunately for this film, they tend to drown in their histrionic antics.
Prisoner's Daughter had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, 2022. The film is 98 minutes long and is currently unrated.