Captivity (2007)

Not long after the turn of the new millennium, the horror genre embraced a fad that's come to be known as "torture porn." Bolstered by the success of the Saw franchise and Eli Roth's Hostel, these ultra-gory, ultra-sadistic movies were seen as having evolved from the splatter movies from the 1970s and 1980s and seemingly dominated the genre during the middle part of the 2000s. Their heyday has essentially come and gone, more current takes on the style usually being relegated to international productions that go direct-to-video and fly under the radar in the United States. And even now, Saw and Hostel are the only ones from that time that anyone remembers, the majority of them having been almost completely forgotten.

Take, for example, the movie Captivity. As its release in the summer of 2007 approached, its advertising campaign was met with controversy after a billboard promoting the movie was viewed as being overtly misogynistic. Joss Whedon himself was so offended by the billboard that he spearheaded an effort to have the MPAA refuse to give the movie a rating and thus stifle its theatrical release. But the controversy and the hype came and went, and seven years after it bombed at the box office, Captivity isn't even a footnote in the horror genre's history. There's a very good reason for that, too: the movie sucks. It's really, really, really, ridiculously bad.

Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert) is one of the most successful fashion models on the planet, with billboards and advertisements featuring her face having become practically ubiquitous. But, if I may paraphrase the lyrics of an old Iggy Pop song, her pretty face is about to go to Hell. Someone spikes her drink while she's out partying one night and she awakens in an elaborate cell, trapped by an unknown captor. As Jennifer's anonymous kidnapper repeatedly brutalizes her both physically and emotionally, she discovers that she's not the only one trapped. In the cell next door is a man named Gary (Daniel Gillies), a drifter who has befallen the same fate as Jennifer. They try to formulate a plan for escape, but their captor has far worse things in store for them.

I'm normally okay with bad movies as long as they're fun. As long as they still manage to be entertaining in some form or fashion, I can honestly forgive a movie for not being very good. And Captivity most certainly is a bad movie. Everything about it is terrible from top to bottom, and the absolute lack of any kind of scares or tension just makes things worse. But the catch is that it's the kind of bad movie that is just a chore to get through. Had the movie been a funny kind of bad, where one could laugh at all of its cheesy faults, it would have been at least tolerable. But instead we're left with a movie that has absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than to try and make a quick buck off the hot horror trend at the time.

At the helm of this disaster is Roland Joffé, a two-time Oscar nominee in the ‘80s whose career pretty much tapered off in the '90s. And if you were to compare his previous work to this movie, you'd swear they were made by two different people with the same name. Captivity is dull, plodding, lifeless. It's like Joffé realized the movie was probably going to be awful no matter what he did, so he didn't bother to even try. There's no spark to anything, nothing that would make it even remotely interesting. It is, in a word, boring.

Even the scenes that are intended to gross out the audiences are more hokey than anything else. I referenced Hostel and Saw as the torchbearers of the "torture porn" movement, and even at their worst, they succeeded in eliciting a visceral reaction from their audiences. Whether you were frightened or nauseated by the blood and guts, you still had a reaction that befitted what you were seeing. But when Elisha Cuthbert's character is force-fed a glass of pureed body parts straight out of a nearby blender, all you can do is just chuckle at how ridiculous the whole thing is. You can't take it seriously because it's just too stupid to react with anything other than either laughter leading to apathy.

The story I heard is that, believe it or not, Joffé didn't get to do the final edit of the movie. Instead, it was supposedly taken away and reshot by producer Courtney Solomon. The story goes that Solomon wasn't satisfied with Captivity being a simple thriller about a young woman being imprisoned, and decided he wanted to cash in on the whole "torture porn" thing while he still could. The guy who made the Dungeons and Dragons movie (a movie so awful that it killed Thora Birch's career and nearly took Jeremy Irons' career with it) and the lousy ghost story An American Haunting reshot a movie made by an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker just so he could add some gore. All Solomon ended up doing was turning Joffé's mediocre thriller into a tragically stupid Saw wannabe.

And the direction isn't the only bad part of Captivity either. There's also the script, written by Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura. Cohen's name will be familiar to fans of low-budget schlock, thanks to the number of classic B-movies ― with titles like Maniac Cop, The Stuff, It's Alive, and Q: The Winged Serpent ― on his résumé. But while Cohen's written some memorable movies of both the mainstream and cult varieties, Captivity isn't really one of them and for good reason. There's no story or plot to speak of; it's one of those movies where things just happen for no real rhyme or reason. It doesn't even go from Point A to Point B because there no sort of narrative path for them to follow. The movie plays along like Cohen and Tura had no endgame in mind when they wrote it. It's like they came up with a bunch of scenes yet didn't think to make them connect in any coherent way.

And on a related note, there's absolutely nothing resembling any sort of character development. The characters are so thin that calling them one-dimensional would be a disservice to other one-dimensional characters. They're so flimsy and underdeveloped that you have no reason to care about them or feel sympathy for them. They're empty shells, devoid of personality or any sort of memorable traits. One feels like Cohen and Tura didn't even try, because it comes across like they're the stand-ins for characters, the blank spaces where characters would had the writers put forth some sort of effort. But all one can do is sit back and watch in disbelief because it's hard to wrap one's head around just how vacant they are. It's like watching department store mannequins being played by flesh-and-blood people.

That leads me to the acting, the awful, awful, awful acting. I'm legitimately amazed at just how bad the acting is. It's not over-the-top, "get a load of this mess" acting like one would see in classic bad movies like Troll 2 or The Room, but a dull, phoned-in, boring kind of acting that makes that department store mannequin joke I made a few sentences ago seem all the more true to life. Elisha Cuthbert was a rising star at the time thanks to her breakout role playing Jack Bauer's daughter on 24, along with her appearances in movies like The Girl Next Door and House of Wax. But Captivity pretty much put a stop to all that. And even if the movie had been a runaway box office success, that wouldn't have changed the fact that Cuthbert is absolutely dreadful here. She never makes one feel any sort of sympathy for her, never makes you want to see her character escape or even care for her well-being. You just want the villain to hurry up and kill her in the hopes that the movie will move on to something or someone more interesting.

Daniel Gillies is just as bad, his performance being equally as laughable as Cuthbert's. He's bad enough in the role of "cheesy token romantic interest," but when a third act twist leads to him becoming more predatory, Gillies becomes more silly than intimidating. All I could do is just shrug my shoulders and ask, "Really? That's how you're approaching this?" The fact that all the scenes that follow this twist are way too stupid for me to wrap my head around doesn't help, but Gillies's awful acting just makes it worse. And when you combine that with Cuthbert's poor efforts, all one has is a great big, groan-worthy mess.

Looking back, the temporary controversy that surrounded Captivity seven years ago is actually pretty funny. People got so worked up over that one billboard, but nobody ever really said anything about the movie itself. And having seen the movie nearly a decade after the fact, it's easy to see why. Captivity is a giant pile of crap, a piss-poor attempt at cashing in on a subgenre that was already in the middle of a drastic decline in popularity. So fast and swift was Captivity's failure that it was shuffled into the land of obscurity almost immediately upon its theatrical release. I myself had even forgotten it had existed at all until last week, when I noticed it mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the Razzie Awards. And the movie should be forgotten. Captivity is simply not worth watching or even remembering.

Final Rating: *