Captivity - Review

As everyone who follows either horror message boards or the Hollywood trade press knows by now, Roland Joffe's Captivity set off a wave of controversy when a series of graphic billboards promoting the film appeared all over L.A. a few months back. An uproar from both expected (parents, the MPAA) and surprising (genre filmmakers Joss Whedon and Eli Roth, whose moral indignation seemed hilariously hypocritical) sources led to the swift removal of the billboards, which marketed torture as mass appeal entertainment. Executive producer Courtney Solomon managed to whip what should have been a minor blip on the pop culture radar into a full-fledged PR frenzy, and after seeing the movie it's easy to see why—neither particularly shocking nor provocative, Captivity needs all the help it can get.

The film's first hour is a brutally stripped down version of the formula similar from other torture horror films like the Saw and Hostel series. With an absolute minimum of dialogue and backstory, director Joffe sends young model Jennifer (Elisha Cuthbert) into a hellish scenario in which she is kidnapped and held in an undisclosed location. In the dungeon-like atmosphere she is tormented by her captor, an anonymous man who tortures her both psychologically and physically. Joffe and screenwriters Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura are relentless in their adherence to one goal and one goal only—to traumatize Jennifer and disturb the audience. They're intermittently successful (a couple of the gory set pieces are genuinely nauseating, which in a movie like this is a compliment), but after a while the monotony of the tone works against the movie's intentions. The violence in Hostel: Part II was effective because it had context; when the infamous penis-snipping scene arrived it was both horrifying and darkly funny because the audience knew the characters well. Here the lack of characterization and the one-note tone just leads to boredom, because there's nothing to measure the bleakness against.

Captivity does get a little more interesting when Jennifer discovers a male captive and the two fall in love, though this romance is so perfunctory it makes the slapdash attraction between Harry and Cho in the new Harry Potter movie look like Brief Encounter. The relationship is welcome in spite of its contrivances, simply because it adds a much needed alternate emotion to the film's unceasing grimness. That Captivity should be so humorless and drab is truly odd given Cohen's presence as a screenwriter; one of the more eccentric and underrated filmmakers of the 1970s, he was responsible for the most energetic blaxploitation movies (Black Caesar and Hell Up in Harlem) as well as the nasty and funny It's Alive trilogy. There's no trace of Cohen's maverick sensibility in this tired Saw retread, and one gets the sense he was heavily rewritten by Tura and others.

Even more depressing than Cohen's name on the credit block is Joffe's, given that he began his career with ambitious and thoughtful movies like The Killing Fields and The Mission and has, with Captivity, morphed into a distressingly anonymous hack. All of the scares in the movie are of the most gimmicky variety, with Joffe turning the sound down low and then blasting the audience with an explosion of Dolby Stereo to make them jump. This isn't filmmaking it's shock treatment. Joffe hints at some kind of social commentary in brief images relating to Jennifer's superficial life as a model, but these clues go nowhere—but then again, neither do most of the other decent ideas in the film. As the story progresses it gets less one-note but more illogical, with one character after another acting stupidly for no reason other than to keep the plot creaking forward. That Captivity isn't a total disaster is probably thanks to the unusually high degree of talent both behind and in front of the camera. In addition to Joffe and Cohen, there's expert cinematographer Daniel Pearl (who lensed the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as its remake), and Cuthbert does well with an underwritten part. The haphazard nature of the storytelling and the poor modulation of tone, however, indicate that there was no strong hand (aside from maybe a market research flack) guiding this particular ship. The movie is technically solid and has occasional bursts of shocking action, but it adds up to almost nothing in the end.