Not terribly captivating
*1/2
Distributor: After Dark
Cast: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Michael Harney and Laz Alonso
Director: Roland Joffe
Screenwriters: Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura
Producers: Mark Damon, James Deck, Sergei Konov, Gary Mehlman and Leonid Minkovski
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Rating: R for strong violence, torture, pervasive terror, grisly images, language and some sexual material
Running Time: 98 min.
Release Date: July 13
“There’s no one coming for you,” a menacing man tells captive cover girl Jennifer Tree near the end of
Captivity. “I’m all you’ve got.”
One can almost imagine the ****** of
Captivity whispering something similar to the actress who agreed to play her, Elisha Cuthbert—whose last major movie was 2005’s
House of Wax. If ******s could whisper, that is. This one can barely string two words together.
Although shot with a modicum of style by a seriously slumming Roland Joffe, a two-time Best Director Oscar nominee for 1984’s
The Killing Fields and 1986’s
The Mission, nothing terribly thrilling happens in this “thriller” about a fashion model who finds herself in a decidedly unfashionable state of, yes,
Captivity after being kidnapped at a crowded charity event at a SoHo hotspot. Certainly nothing as shocking as the four-paneled billboards depicting her “abduction,” “confinement,” “torture” and “termination” that went up around Los Angeles in March (back when the movie was supposed to open in May), only to be taken down after a public outcry that led to MPAA sanctions.
For the record, that “torture” amounts to something one might see on a particularly putrid episode of
Fear Factor, with Jennifer at one point forced to guzzle a literal Bloody Mary—a gruesome mixture of body parts, including eyes and ears, harvested from a previous victim and blended in front of her. In another session, she’s bullied into blasting her beloved canine companion with a shotgun—the gore raining down on her from above.
Pretty tame, to be sure. But, then again, how much can you really expect from a pair of psychos who spend their spare time taking bubble baths, making scrap books and hand-feeding each other sushi rolls. No, seriously. They do.
They also frame one of Jennifer’s ads and hang it on the wall of her cell. The product being advertised? Perfume. But it’ll take more than that to disguise the scent of this stinker.
Captivity || Movie Review
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