Movie Review: Captivity

Captivity (2007)

Directed by Roland Joffe 

Written by Larry Cohen 

Starring Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Laz Alonzo 

Release Date July 13th, 2007

Published July 13th, 2007

Director Roland Joffe made a splashy Hollywood debut with back to back Best Director Oscar nominations for 1984's The Killing Fields and 1986's The Mission. From there his career has been a precipitous freefall. He followed up The Mission with 1989's bloated cold war drama Fat Man and Little Boy and 1992's dull Patrick Swayze drama City of Joy.

Then Joffe really hit the skids. In 1996 Joffe teamed with then hot star Demi Moore for a remake of The Scarlett Letter that is now a legendary debacle. Joffe has worked only one other time in the past decade, a forgettable period piece called Vatel, and he returns to the big screen with yet another disastrous turn. His latest, Captivity , is an ugly little enterprise in brainless brutality.

Elisha Cuthbert stars in Captivity as Jenifer, a supermodel/actress who, as luck would have it for our central serial killer, travels the streets of New York with no bodyguard or boyfriend. Luckier still, she goes to a hot nightclub where she has no friends, acquaintances or hangers on of any kind, leaving her wide open to be drugged and carried off by some skeevy loser.

When Jenifer awakens, she finds herself locked in a cell where she will be repeatedly drugged and tortured. Thankfully, there is another captive next door, Gary (Daniel Gillies), who helps keep Jenifer sane and plan a way out of this situation. Along the way Jenifer and Gary fall for each other and more than just a little captive romance gets going, even as the two are tortured in tandem.

Rumor has it that director Roland Joffe crafted a more cerebral take on this material, less gore, more psychology. It is alleged that After Dark Films honcho Courtney Solomon rejected that cut and ordered re-shoots that eventually churned out this mind numbingly brutal exercise in torture porn ugliness. Whether that story is true or not, it's hard not to notice how some of the more disturbing, violent or just plain disgusting scenes in Captivity feel tacked on.

As this dopey plot unfolds, with one confoudingly ludicrous scene after another, it nearly becomes Ed Wood-ian in its overall ineptitude with director Roland Joffe not in the Ed Wood role but more like the sad, tragic, aged Bela Lugosi. Blissfully unaware of how awful the project is, Joffe plunges ahead with all the professionalism he can muster and does manage to keep the film looking as if it were directed with some talent.

However, the blundering storyline and ridiculous turns of plot undermine any attempt by Mr. Joffe to make Captivity anything more than an exercise in numbing sub-genre histrionics.

So what is the entertainment value of Captivity? Are we frightened? Not really, the flaws in the films logic remove much of any suspense. Are we disgusted? Yeah sure, but do you find that bubbling in your stomach as a character is force fed a human remains smoothie, entertaining? I don't. And so we are left with ogling star Elisha Cuthbert, something one could do in the privacy of their own home with an FHM Magazine and a far more satisfying result.

A quick disclaimer for you PETA members out there. There is a scene with a dog in Captivity that will have you rushing to the door to get a ticket refund. Save yourself the trouble of watching the scene, take my word for it, just start protesting now.

Captivity is really faux torture porn horror pic. The film is padded with extra gore and some disturbing images in the marketing to glom off the supposed cool of films like Hostel or Wolf Creek. In reality, Captivity is a bad movie tagged with extra violence and viscera as a marketing technique. Maybe that story about the reshoots is true but the logic was likely that Captivity is so bad as a psychological horror film that gory was the only way to give the film a pulse.

Whatever the reasoning, it didn't help. Gore or no gore, Captivity is simply a bad movie.