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Written by Roger Moore, MCT
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Friday, 13 July 2007 |
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 ___
CAPTIVITY
1 star (out of 5)
Cast: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies.
Director: Roland Joffe.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.
Industry rating: R for strong violence, torture, pervasive terror, grisly images, language and some sexual material.
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"Captivity" is another one of those "torture porn" thrillers you've been hearing about.
Some character or other is taken prisoner by some often faceless/often motiveless villain. And tortured. Videotaped, too. Think "Saw." These are its spawn.
The shock here is that it was directed by the man who made the compassionate, soulful "Killing Fields," the compassionate, soulful "The Mission," the compassionate and Patrick Swayze-silly "City of Joy."
Times must be hard in the Roland Joffe house. Ignore those whispers about "re-shoots" and "re-editing." This is awful and was never going to be anything but awful.
How bad? So bad that even gaping at the yummy Elisha Cuthbert for 85 minutes doesn't seem worth it.
She's the victim, or rather plays her. Jennifer is a New York supermodel. She's taken. She's tormented. She's tortured. And so on.
They cover this in about 20 minutes in the second week of film school - "How to Make a Splatter Picture: Torture Porn-style."
Somebody in a cowl and gloves is pasting letters in a photo album. He's done a little bit of Plaster of Paris work earlier. He's not speaking, but he's telling us the story, chapter by chapter.
"Selecting the Victim."
We follow the stalking from a camcorder point-of-view. We see her drugged and taken. We wake up with her.
"WHERE AM I?" she screams, redundantly.
A little gassing, the odd injection, and she's shown videos of earlier acid tortures on TV.
Twenty-five minutes in, "he" blends up body parts and gore and pours it down her throat. Gag.
She's not alone. Somebody else (Daniel Gillies) is a hostage in this dungeon.
Thirty-four minutes in, the old suffocation-by-sand trick.
Thirty-eight minutes - the old "fake car escape" bit.
Two minutes later, pliers pull out somebody's tooth.
Two minutes further, the obligatory "hero sex" scene.
Fifty-seven minutes of "Capitivity" and there's a "shocking" turn of events. (Not to us. We figured it out 10 minutes ago.)
And it's all downhill from there. No acting, no pulse-pounding suspense, no humor or vicarious visceral thrills.
There's a story, here, and not on the screen. It's about what happened to a once-fine filmmaker that brought him this low.
Was it Patrick Swayze?
That's a movie I'd escape from this to see.
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