RatingMovies.Com - ldh's review of Prisoner, The (2009)

One of the things that made the original series so cool was the intellectual mind games the characters were engaging into. Manipulation and deception were played tit for tat in an accute game of chess between No.6 and the shadowy forces behind the Village. Everything in the series was designed to throw you off and confuse you in your assumptions and your sense of reality. And like the best games of chess, advances were achieved by strategic outmaneuverings, not accidents. In the end, No.6 always proved to be the smartest, episode after episode, battle after battle, inching up all the way through to final victory for the war.

When i started watching this "remake", i had high hopes. Certainly, the overall production value was pretty high, with very good design elements. The first episode was also loaded with mysterious things, and Ian McKellen (as No.2) is always a pleasure to watch. However, the final result simply doesn't gel together at all, and what started as mysteries quickly became by the end of the second episode a collection of confusing plot elements, leading to nowhere, frustrating a lot more than intriguing. The biggest issue in my mind is with N0.6 (James Caviezel). James manages to do his best as an actor, but the character is simply written as a lightweight winnie.

In case you do want to watch this, i don't want to reveal too much from the story. Suffice to say that this was forced by the overall story, which is quite different from the original series. You won't have an international conspiracy to keep ex secret service agents who know too much out of the way. No.6 is not engaging in a battle of wits here to escape from forced confinement/retirement. In this version, No.6 is trying to get back his wits after a major shell shock. The story here is much more fantastical and psychological, meaning that N0.6 is thrown into a world as if he had awaken from a coma and suffered partial amnesia. He is intellectually and psycholoogicaly diminished, confused, and spends the entire series in a semi-daze, trying to recover his senses.

TRAILER

This approach could have been interesting, but it's almost as if it had been doomed right from the beginning. There was, almost as if by design, no real room for the smarts and twists of the original series because of this crippling confusion for the main character. The film makers might have been better off not calling this The Prisoner and going their own way instead, fashioning out a strange psychological tale that might have worked. As it was completed though, there are simply too many expectations from the original, and too many borrowed elements from the original, to render this new version insipid and lacking in imagination.

- Laurent Hasson