Given that America's leaders don't feel that the
Geneva Conventions apply to them, it's ironic how much moral outrage has
recently been directed at so-called "torture porn," the grisly sub-genre that
may be petering out with the sputtering box-office performance of the Hills
Have Eyes
and Hostel
sequels. The trouble with many of the apocalyptic reviews, which apply to even
to the most skillful and effective examples, is that they fail to make
distinctions between art and trash; if a film offers up torture for viewers'
presumed edification, then it couldn't possibly have any merit, right? Yet
there's a world of difference between The Devil's Rejects and Wolf Creek—which work in the
bracing (and, in the former case, politically loaded) tradition of The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre—and bottom-feeding garbage like Captivity, which tries to nibble
the stale crumbs of the Saw phenomenon.
In spite of co-writer Larry Cohen, the
high-concept B-movie wizard behind Q: The Winged Serpent and the It's Alive trilogy, Captivity goes about its business
in surprisingly rudimentary fashion. With little setup, famous fashion model
Elisha Cuthbert gets lured to a nightclub for a charity event, but a bad guy
spikes her appletini and spirits her away to his torture chamber. Communicating
with her strictly through cut-and-paste notes, disturbing video footage, and
booby traps in the room, the captor subjects Cuthbert to various horrors, most
involving the misuse of a Cuisinart. Cuthbert finds an unexpected ally when she
discovers another victim (Daniel Gillies) in the cell adjacent to hers, but in
this controlled environment, someone's watching their every move.
As with the Saw movies, there's a big
twist behind all these gross machinations, but once it arrives, it raises the
question of why the writers didn't come up with another twist to cover up the
honkingly obvious one. A long way from The Killing Fields—or even his
famously botched version of The Scarlet Letter, for that
matter—director Roland Joff? halfheartedly builds atmosphere with dim
lighting, scratchy sound effects, and more surveillance equipment than Fort Knox.
In a genre where killers love to play head games, it's a clever idea (Cohen's?)
to have this one remain mute, but that leaves Cuthbert to carry much of the
psychological load, and there's no substance to her character, apart from the
suggestion that she's being punished for her vanity. Captivity has the compulsory
quality of a straight-to-DVD movie—and considering the fast-fading
torture-porn movement, that's no doubt the destiny of similar offerings to
follow.