Chained Movie Review 265

   
Chained is a 2012 thriller/horror written and directed by Jennifer Lynch(yes, daughter of David Lynch) and starring Vincent D'Onofrio and Eamon Farren.

Sarah Fittler(Julia Ormond in a very small role) and her son, Tim(Evan Bird) are spending the day together and they decide to take a taxi home. They soon realise that the driver of the cab has missed their turn and they scream at him, but he ignores them. He drives them out to the middle of nowhere where his house is and he takes the mother away as the kid screams. He comes back later, bloody and he tells the kid that his mother won't be coming back. He tells the kid that he will call him Rabbit and that he will be his servant. He trains him to do everything for him and he has him attached to a chain when he tries to escape. It turns out that the killer is Bob(D'Onofrio) and he is a serial killer. He uses his cab to pick up victims. Rabbit becomes an unwilling participant in cleaning up after the kills.

Cut to years later and Rabbit is older now and played by Eamon Farren. Rabbit is still serving Bob and living on a chain. Bob tells him that he wants him to read up about the human body and learn things.
He wants him to follow in his footsteps and start killing too. Rabbit is not interested. Bob brings back a girl for him to get laid, but Rabbit won't do anything. Bob kills her anyway. He has a high school yearbook and he makes Rabbit choose a girl from that so that he can have his first sexual experience.
Rabbit is amazed when the girl is brought back and he is expected to have sex with her. He doesn't want to. He pretends to kill her and he takes her down to the basement where he tells her to wait until she can escape. Bob finds out and they fight. Rabbit kills Bob and he frees the girl(or does he?). Rabbit goes to visit his father who has since remarried and had another kid. He tells his dad that he knows that Bob was his uncle who took him in when Rabbit's dad paid Bob to kill his wife Sara and son Tim. 

It turns out that Tim's dad is a bully too and as he attacks his wife when she tries to intervene between them, Tim kills him. The wife tells him to get out and she will pretend that a burglar broke in and killed her husband.Tim returns to the house where he was kept for so many years and we hear him getting into the cab at the end of the movie. Is he going to become a serial killer like his captor?? This movie was very slow in parts and some of the actions of the kid didn't make sense. He had chance after chance to kill Bob, but he didn't. He could have tried to escape many times, but chose not to. He found a knife on one of the victims, but it was never seen again.I know that he might have been traumatised but it just didn't ring true. The ending was a little silly too. He just killed his dad and the wife covered for him. That just seemed weird to me. The fact that Bob was his uncle was not a huge twist, it was more like a groan.All in all, D'Onofrio was very good in this as he always is in films and he carried this movie. If he hadn't been in it, I would have turned it off. Some good parts, but slow in others, this is getting a 5/10.