Captivity: The Blackhole

To say this movie sucks like a blackhole, it a complement to how well Blackholes suck. Captivity is Roland Joffe's (an Academy Award Nominee for directing The Killing Fields) horror thiller about a super-star model Jennifer (House of Wax's Elisha Cuthbert) who is kidnapped, tortured, and miserably tries to find comfort in her partner in isolation, Gary (Daniel Gillies). Drapped in a black hood is their tormentor, who has set the basement-prison with cameras, many levels of control, and numberous ways to halfway escape, which are found at the most conveint moments. The only surprise larger than how they always manage to halfway escape, almost get killed, and conveintly still have energy to get around, is how Roland Joffe could have gone from The Killing Fields to this.

Where to begin on this movie? Captivity isn't a homage to the better horror films, or even to the recent "torture-porn" films. It's a rip off, as though it tried to save you rental fees by putting the Hostel and Saw series into a single movie, only to find yourself shredding your Blockbuster card in disappointment. While I have gone against most critics by not calling the Saw and Hostel series "torture porn," this movie goes off to make torture porn because it relies solely on the content and not the way it is presented. Hostel and Saw added a point-of-view to their torture scenes, so the audience would have feeling of fear and angst when the camera-work and sound would create a feeling of relation to the captured. There is a symbolism in the first torturor of Hostel using a drill, Saw using saws, etc. Captivity relies solely on content, and goes further than Saw and Hostel in a vain attempt to make up for their lack of relation to the characters and scenes. In fact, Captivity merely takes from the others, from the hood and games of Saw, all the way up to the twist ending that is seen from a mile away due to the minimal plot we feel is being tortured alongside Cuthbert.

Dialogue is non-existant until near the end. The most we hear Cuthbert say is when she is talking to herself on her cellphone. Not even 10 minutes later, she is kidnapped. No emotion is written in for her. She begs for her life like all the other girls before her, but we see no regret, no aggressiveness, no depression from her. Even after she is force-fed the unmentionable, there is no scene where she gags, throws up, or tries to wash her mouth out, only she wakes up, throws the occasional hissy-fit. This is the only "thing" we see her eat, yet she still has the will-power to fight time and again whenever they find another convient way to half-way escape before being punished in a Hostel-like fashion.

With no dialogue and minimal plot, there's no acting to be done. The only distinguishing achievement of this film is it's worse than Hostel and Saw (any movie in either series), in both plot and gore. Hostel set a stage for being in the mindframe of the tortured. Hostel 2 was a series of movie references, where Lady Bathory literally had her blood bath and the director of Cannibal Holocaust plays a cannibal in the film. Saw was mind-game, psychological torture (whether it is effective is another story, but the point is it tries). Captivity tries to repeat these, only it fails on every level. We don't relate to the characters as no time was given to get to know them, the situations are rip-offs if not copies, and the mind-game is predictable while no reflections from the characters allow no insight to the psychological aspects. The torture scenes (as opposed to the captivity scenes) are irrevelant to the plot.

The ending is too abrupt. Cuthbert eventually does escape, but without smile or chase. She walks out of the room like the people walking out of her movie, shocked and speechless in a bad way. As the credits rolled, I was left thinking of all the ways we could have had any reaction from her: cry, smile, run, hug the ground, slash her wrists, get hit by a bus! Anything would have been better than the flatland ending that is home to the equally flat character.

So, three things: Entertainment, marketability, and memorability.

Entertaining? No. Predictable? Yes. There's not much point in timing if you know the bad guy is going to appear well before he does. What comes next is always screaming at you.

Marketable? Just because people are willing to watch it doesn't mean it's good. The low sales say something, but when the movie comes to DVD, I'm sure Hostel and Saw will more than kick its ass.

Memorable? This is where we get into the big question: Why make this movie? I've come up with a total of two, and only two reasons. The first is to make a commentary on today's obsessive culture. Aside from being a lousy premise of a movie (you should make a movie that happens to be a commentary, not a commentary that happens to be a movie), no message comes across. What message are we suppose to have? Cuthbert walks away without an expression or detail to her walk, only that she goes. The villian's demise is quick, mildly grusome, and (again) stolen from Hostel 2. No lesson learned. Monster's Aileen Wornoese at least left a message of victimizing others creates the monster in the victims. Here, no backstory from any character eleminates any meaning to the survival, death, pain, or endurment of anyone.

The second reason is to merely challenge the MPAA's system for R ratings. Admittingly, he does out-do Hostel's violence. But the torture here (specifically the "blender" scene) is gratuitous- there just so they can say it was there. I'm not defending the MPAA, as I can tell they did some careful editing after that scene to make sure it would still be R instead of NC-17. However, there are better ways to combat the MPAA. Again, I direct us to Hostel 2. Eli Roth included a scene featuring a severed head used as a soccer ball in a reference to the great, late Stanley Kubrick, who couldn't have a similiar scene in Full Metal Jacket. Eli Roth's scene is a marker to show how far we've come in accepting violence in films. Joffe's is porn, no different than The Brown Bunny's fellatio scene, with proper editting, is actually revealing Vincent Gallo's character development more than Chloe Sevigny's lipwork, while late night Cinemax is lipwork with the storyline depth of Captivity.

As I said before, like a blackhole, it is a film that sucks nothing into nothingness.