“Prisoners,” a new crime drama starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, is the worst kind of B movie. It presents itself like a classic slow burner, with a number of memorable and intense scenes, but quickly wastes its potential with a series of plot twists straight out of Scooby-Doo.

Jackman plays Keller Dover, an overprotective, religious family man with a completely real-sounding name. We meet him on a hunting trip, during which he forces his son to shoot a deer. Then, on the car ride home, he lectures him on being prepared for society’s inevitable collapse.

Soon after they return, Keller is faced with the type of life-shattering emergency he’d been waiting for: his six-year-old daughter is abducted in front of their own house. The policeman on the case, Detective Loki (Gyllenhaal), has a suspect but no evidence, and the frenetic Keller, feeling powerless for the first time, takes matters into his own hands.

What “Prisoners” succeeds at most is setting the mood. It fills the screen with grays and dull blues, and each establishing shot pans forward slowly and ominously. Unfortunately, bleakness isn’t enough to carry a movie, and as compelling as many of the earlier scenes are, the plot quickly gets ridiculous. The first half of the film is an Oscar-caliber mystery drama, but it eventually just gives up.

While the plot leaves much to be desired, Gyllenhaal is surprisingly good as Detective Loki, a character with so little backstory his half-dozen tattoos might as well read “character development.” Also good is perennial creep Paul Dano, the kidnapping suspect with “the IQ of a ten year old.” Dano’s demeanor and everything he gives the viewer just scream “spooky.” Jackman makes a strong effort as well, but soon becomes a one-note character, motivated exclusively by his goal and shouting seventy percent of his lines.

“Prisoners” is not a bad movie, just a very disappointing one. It sets the scene as well as any classic mystery and then goes nowhere—and slowly at that. One sub-par aspect of the film is the religious symbolism with which director Denis Villeneuve pelts the audience. While the imagery is potent, there’s no real reason for its presence. Until the end, that is, when the exposed villain declares, in a gloriously expository monologue, that he is “waging a war on God.” By then, however, it’s too little too late. The viewer is left with a sense that religion wasn’t a theme as much as it was a half-hearted attempt to properly motivate characters.

Clocking in at two hours and twenty-six minutes, “Prisoners” is a long and harrowing journey, but by the end it seems that it was not worth the trouble. It aspires to be a morally complex “Silence of the Lambs” but ends up being more like a “Law and Order” episode, with the same old, tired, and unbelievable plot devices.