Film Reviews

Captivity

• Rating:
• Director: Roland Joffe
• Starring: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Giles, Pruitt Taylor Vince.
• Details: USA / Russia / 85 mins. Cert: 18.

A beautiful model (Cuthbert) is abducted by a masked assailant and then subjected to various types of elaborate torture. She then discovers a man in the next room in the same situation, and they both plot to find a way out. Now that the arse has apparently fallen out of the impermanent sub-genre that is horror porn, you'd be forgiven for being completely unaware that this film existed - despite a forceful marketing campaign that saw its posters banned. Captivity's problems are deep and plenteous; from a horribly pedestrian and cliched script, to heavy handed direction, and performances so uninspired you'll feel the actors read their lines from a teleprompter as the scenes progress. While simplicity in plot can often be a friend to horror films, here it causes you to lose interest after the first victim is unimaginatively dispatched in a Saw-like manor by our masked killer. Director Joffe (The Killing Fields (!)) offers us precious little build-up in order to construct tension, so we have no reason to care for our protagonist, as she appears to be nothing more than a superficial cardboard cut-out of a character; this leaves Cuthbert to whimper unconvincingly as the sorry excuse for a progressive narrative predictably saunters on. In the last few weeks alone, we've had Vacancy, The Hitcher and Paradise Lost, and next week we'll have Hostel 2 to contend with. All of these films are bland, excessive cash-ins for folk who like their guts filmed up close, and all have died a messy death at the box-office for reasons that are too obvious to further divulge here. Ultimately Captivity is a rip-off of a rip-off, taking its cues mainly from Saw. It also steals liberally from Seven (naturally enough), and Silence of the Lambs, but fails to emulate even the overtly derivative Saw sequels. A sorry excuse for a genre film, and a bewildering choice for Joffe as a director, after a couple of minor classics.

Review by Mike Sheridan