A stupendously inane and pointless slice of revenge-based horror whose title might as well describe the audience watching it, The Tortured chronicles the story of a young married couple’s capture and torment of the man convicted of kidnapping and murdering their five-year-old son. Told in hammy fashion and marked by a pair of hysterical, uneven lead performances, this inept genre entry is an embarrassment to almost all involved.
A mass of expository set-up opens the movie, which centers around suburbanites Craig and Elise Landry (Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen). Craig witnesses their son being snatched from their front yard, and a feverish search ensues, along with glimpses of the psychotic abductor, John Kozlowski (Bill Moseley, adding another demented jewel to his crown of leering, morally detestable reprobates), terrorizing and presumably molesting the boy. The police finally nab John, but not in time to save the Landrys’ son. When he’s convicted with the possibility of parole, Elise and Craig, a doctor, hatch a plan to extricate John from police custody and extract their own systematic retribution, keeping their victim alive for as long as possible. As a detective (Fulvio Cecere) works to locate the presumably escaped John, the couple hole up in an abandoned house, but soon find their own moral compasses put to the test.
Other films, including Dennis Iliadis’ recent remake of The Last House on the Left, have with some success delved specifically into parents pushed too far, and/or confronted with harm to their child. So the failings of The Tortured do not lay with its conceit; instead, they’re a matter of vision and execution. The movie, penned by Mark Posival and directed in stirringly bungled fashion by Robert Lieberman, stumbles out of the gate, never seeming to come up with a good “in” for its story. From its first panicked scene, The Tortured starts off at such a high emotional pitch that it renders nearly everything that follows almost neutered by comparison.
For a movie in theory about the warping, darkly transformative power of parental grief, there’s a striking paucity of intellectual application or even basic ideas here. The film clocks in at a meager 82 minutes, but its first 20 minutes could easily be collapsed to but five or six. After plodding along and setting up its torturing-the-monster conceit, the third act stupidly hinges on poorly reasoned flip-flops in intestinal fortitude between Craig and Elise. There’s an almost obligatory end twist, of course, but the movie doesn’t even see this through to the end, instead wrapping things up in a manner almost as tidy is it is risible.
Metcalfe and Christensen most bear the weight of this problematic narrative; they’re not particularly convincing as parents, and, individually and collectively, their interpretations of grief chiefly exist in volume. This film is a mess, and not in a campy, entertaining way. Avoid the torture. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. NOTE: In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Tortured is available on a variety of VOD and digital platforms, including iTunes. (IFC Midnight, R, 82 minutes)