Captivity is so ineptly conceived and staged it could be the first torture-porn comedy. This is the kind of movie in which the supposedly dead killer makes one last, gasping attack with a knife sticking out of his gut.
Elisha Cuthbert – who was objectified less when she played a porn star in The Girl Next Door – stars as a famous model who is promptly kidnapped shortly after the opening credits and subjected to various forms of torture for the rest of the film. At the very least, Captivity has its own form of honesty: The movie doesn’t even pretend to be about anything but the degradation of its female lead. I’m not sure any filmmaking prowess could have saved this sort of material, but out-of-place director Roland Joffe (The Mission) seemingly has such disdain for it that he doesn’t bother to give Captivity much narrative or visual coherence. You get the impression it was torture for him to make.
