Movie Review: Captivity

Captivity is the perfect title for this movie as I and, I'm sure, 99% of the patrons in the theater felt as though we were held hostage for 90 minutes as we sat through this steaming pile of drivel.

The movie started off well enough with a very "Hostel" like opening scene in which we see a girl being tortured by a facesless assailant and then brutally killed but from there it was all downhill. Elisha Cuthbert (TV's "24") plays a spoiled glamor model very much in the Paris Hilton vain who is abducted in a nightclub leaving behind her puppy which she had brought with her (yes we all get the none too subtle Paris reference). This happens right at the start with little or no backstroy about her character except for little snippets that are constantly shown of her doing an interview from some entertainment TV show. You instantly dislike her and don't really care if she lives or dies, which is not a good feeling to have about the heroine of a horror movie. You would think that the filmmakers would have made her character a little more sympathetic so that the audience would at least have a little empathy for her.

Fast forward to when she wakes up in her nicely furnished dungeon which looks just like home except for the mysterious lockers labelled with the numbers 1 through 4. There is also a TV in the room whic shows clips of her talking interspersed with some graphic scenes of the things the abductor has done to previous victims, and occassionaly the lights go off sending Miss Cuthbert into a frenzy of really bad acting.

Our damsel in distress soon discovers that there is a handsome hunk locked up in a room beside hers and they go through an obnoxiously tedious process of sending messages by scraping them on the painted glass divider before realizing that there is a vent right above their heads that they can talk through.....no-one ever claimed that models were smart. They go from despising each other to being completely besotted in the space of 4 days and in the meantime our heroine is passed keys numbered 1 through 4 through a sliding door. The numbered keys match the lockers. What gruesome mystery do the lockers hold? A fresh change of clothes for our victim...GASP!!

It's at this point that I started to really doze off as the movie jumped from one ridicuolus escape scenario to the next, and the identity of the perpetrators becomes painfully obvious even to the dimmest people in the audience. I almost forgot to mention that while all this is going on there is a side story involving the detectives investigating this missing persons case. All the scenes involve them talking about how baffled they are or sitting in their squad car talking about how baffled they are, yet they crack the case wide open in no time at all.

This is an absolute monstrosity of a movie and you really have to wonder how something like this gets the green light from movie studios. Bad acting, bad directing, horrible storyline and plot and not a single redeeming quality. It really was hard to tell whther I was watching a Lifetime movie of the week or an episode of the upcoming "The Simple Life Goes To Jail".

0 stars out of 5