From the outline of Prisoner’s Daughter, you might swear it was written, directed by and starred Clint Eastwood, who in fact had nothing to do with it. A lifer, and ex-boxer, is given months to live after a cancer diagnosis. He’s let out for compassionate reasons, on the condition he stay under house arrest with his estranged daughter, a struggling single mother, in the suburbs of Las Vegas.
While doing his damnedest to repair that bitterly broken relationship, this salty old lag also imparts lessons in being a man to his grandson, a quippy but insecure teen who’s being bullied at school. Because of the kid’s reprobate father, who’s a vicious drug addict, violence looms ominously on the horizon – as it did in Eastwood’s Gran Torino, perhaps the single most obvious inspiration.
That lunge towards brutality is one of the least convincing elements in a generally dubious tale. Scene by scene, even when it’s just turning in basic character development, Mark Bacci’s script boasts the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. It’s a case of the cast fighting to elevate it against the odds – with the help (and sometimes hindrance) of a director, Catherine Hardwicke, who’d love to give this the emotional grit of her Thirteen (2003).
The three main performances do come to the rescue. Brian Cox, as the Eastwood-ish Max, has that sly steel and rueful air he can summon so well, tempered with something much more benign than we saw in Succession: unlike Logan Roy, Max is on an earnest quest to redeem himself. If anything, his patience in turning over one last leaf is too saintly for its own good –for longer than it needs to, the role rather neutralises Cox’s rage. The film could have gained something if it let flickers of Max’s old menace keep us on the edge.
Christopher Convery, as an unpopular kid who idolises his awful dad (Tyson Ritter), has to make Bacci’s smart-alecky banter work: wouldn’t you know, he has the talent to be just the right side of annoying here. Boxing lessons, though? That’s certainly an Eastwoody touch too much. And the less said about Hardwicke’s taste in alt-rock on the soundtrack, the better.
If there’s one reason to see Prisoner’s Daughter, it’s Kate Beckinsale. She’s styled perfectly for Maxine, an exhausted mum trying to put her worst choices behind her, and really digs in with a sense of grievance, not letting her dad off the hook anywhere near as soon as he would like. In potentially clumsy monologues, she’s moving: you believe she’s from Vegas, and has been thrown around in service industry jobs so long she wishes she wasn’t. It’s not the film she – or we – might have wanted it to be, but watching her find moments of raw truth amid the hooey, I was impressed.