Prisoner’s Daughter review – Brian Cox and Kate Beckinsale can’t save hammy ex-con drama – The Guardian
Here’s a horrible TV-movie-style piece of labor with some terrible performing and a deeply questionable, crass finale; it’s all of the extra wince-inducing given the lineup of alpha expertise behind it. Catherine Hardwicke is the director of the highly effective 13, the primary and finest Twilight, and the tender Miss You Already (2015); her lead actor right here is none aside from Brian Cox, whose star may hardly be extra starrily within the ascendant after his beautiful efficiency as Murdochian media plutocrat Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession. There’s additionally the estimable Kate Beckinsale. However there’s solely a lot they will do with this materials.
Cox performs Max, an ageing powerful man in jail, given compassionate go away after a terminal most cancers prognosis to spend his remaining months with long-suffering daughter Maxine (Beckinsale). She is a hardworking single mum residing within the featureless suburban district round Las Vegas along with her teenage son Ezra (Christopher Convery), who’s being bullied in school on account of his epileptic seizures. Maxine nonetheless resents her grizzled dad for placing crime above household, however the previous man needs to make issues proper and – just like the fierce ex-boxer that he’s – reveals Ezra the right way to take care of the bullies. (Prepare within the fitness center and beat them up seems to be the reply to this one.)
It’s fairly average stuff, however the film falls flat on its face with Ezra’s absent dad: a junkie loser and punk musician (performed by Tyson Ritter) who evidently deserves zero compassion or redemption and whose scenes are virtually unwatchably hammy and embarrassing. Cox lends the film some weight, however is nonetheless landed with a dodgy and preposterous sacrificial ending by which he apparently goads and entraps somebody right into a critical crime. One for Hardwicke, and everybody else, to neglect.
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