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.

Movie Review Stomp the Yard

Stomp the Yard (2007) 

Directed by Sylvain White 

Written by Gregory Anderson

Starring Columbus Short, Meagan Good, Ne-Yo, Darrin Henson, Brian White, Laz Alonzo, Harry Lennix

Release Date January 12th, 2007

Published January 16th, 2007 

MTV Films has pioneered a new kind of filmmaking. It's a low budget, high teen appeal style that involves formula stories about young protagonists and killer soundtracks that drive the film's marketing. It began with the dance drama Save The Last Dance and continued through the surprise 2004 dance hit You Got Served. The new movie Stomp The Yard is not an MTV film but it follows the MTV Films business plan. Made on the cheap, with a killer hip hop soundtrack and cameos by hip hop stars, Stomp The Yard made its budget back over the opening weekend.

That is great for business but the formula filmmaking is tired and the cheapness shows in the low quality of the filmmaking. Stomp The Yard may have youth appeal but it lacks greatly in story and filmmaking appeal. 

In Stomp The Yard Columbus Short plays D.J, a wrong side of the tracks kid from the L.A streets who finds himself in college in Atlanta after the violent death of his brother Duron. At Truth University his hard ass uncle Nate works on the campus landscaping and had to pull every string imaginable to get D.J in. Once there, D.J's culture shock includes a crash course in stepping, a dance competition among historic African American fraternities.

D.J knows how to step, he and his late brother and a team of friends were battle dancers back in L.A before Duron was killed after a competition. Now in Atlanta, D.J is shy about getting into stepping but after showing off for a girl in a bar, D.J becomes a hot commodity among the top two frats on campus, who also happen to be the top two stepping frats in the country.

The girl D.J danced for is April (Meagan Goode) and she happens to be the girlfriend of a top stepper, Grant (Darrin Henson) and the daughter of the school provost. If you think both of these attributes will be laid out as romantic obstacles and then easily overcome, then you have likely seen a few of these formula films in the past. Indeed, those on the wrong side of the tracks always seem to get the girl, especially when the upper crust of society forbids it.

There are few clichés that Stomp The Yard doesn't stomp all over on the way to its rote conclusion. Director Sylvain White, like most directors of January filler material, isn't so much a director as he is a vessel for transporting this cliché ridden script to the screen with little innovation. His style choices are sloppy and he seems to have no interest in the story beyond the opportunities it offers to film elaborate dance scenes.

Throughout Stomp The Yard White opts for a shaky handheld camera work that is sloppy and distracting, especially during the dance scenes where the camerawork makes you doubt just how spectacular the dancing really is. Throughout the film there are confusing scenes where one person or a team dances and one is alleged to be better than the other but we have no idea why. Each side is precise and athletic, even charismatic, but why one is better than the other is left completely subjective to individual taste. The way these scenes are put together however, it seems like we are supposed to understand that one side has been shown up, but for the life of me I had no idea why.

There is an interesting idea buried beneath the retread plot of Stomp The Yard. A movie that focuses its energy on why stepping is so venerated and why it is such a marvelous tradition. Stomp The Yard simply wishes for us to assume stepping is an important part of the culture, it never bothers to explain why. An education in the styles and grading of stepping might make an interesting movie or a better documentary.

For an education in battle dancing, more specifically a battle between krumping and clowning, check out David LaChappelle's documentary Rize. That film is gorgeously shot with no cuts during the dance scenes to prove that indeed no tricks were used, these dancers really did those amazing things. The crew of Stomp The Yard could have learned a lot watching Rize.

As it is, it seems that the Stomp The Yard crew watched how successful the clichés of 2005's You Got Served worked as a business model and simply copied them with slightly less skill. Yes, Stomp The Yard makes You Got Served look better by comparison. That is really saying something.