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PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/16/07)

This thoroughly irritating little film would be an excellent case study on the adage "Too many chefs spoil the broth, particularly if one or more of the chefs is a complete incompetent," if its awfulness were in any way noteworthy. Captivity's tricked-up kidnapped-model plotline sprang from the eccentrically pulpy imagination of Larry Cohen (It's Alive, God Told Me To, the script of Phone Booth), who could have pumped out a draft of it before settling down to breakfast. In Cohen's directorial hands it might have ended up a halfway decent B-thriller, but for some reason, the helming duties were given to Joffe, the ever-hamfisted one-time "prestige" director (The Killing Fields, The Mission, the atrocious Demi Moore Scarlet Letter) who brings the thriller genre some exciting ideas for maximizing scares, such as amplifying every single boo-type sound effect about ten times as much as almost any other meretricious hack would. And finally, there's Captivity's uncredited creative partner, Courtney Solomon, whose After Dark is a distributor for the film. Some Solomon-ordered reshoots, reported Michael Ciepley in the New York Times, "added explicit torture, including a so-called 'milkshake' scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it." (Solomon also concocted the distasteful yet lame promotions for the film, including a series of posters that provoked the ire of the MPAA in the spring.)

The result is neither fish nor flesh nor even a mess of pottage, but a thoroughly unappetizing and uninvolving cinematic loogie. Cuthbert's model-actress character is barely established — and most of what's established is her triviality — before she's drugged and whisked away to a large, variously booby-trapped cell.

With nothing much to empathize with, the mind wanders. How do the psychos in movies who kidnap and torture women afford all this stuff? The real estate alone must be a fortune, 'cause you can't really rent. Who's got that kind of dough? Hedge fund managers, maybe — is kidnapping and torturing women what they do to unwind? They wouldn't really have the time for that, no? Also, what kind of contractor do you get to install and set up, say, a large plexiglass enclosure you can gradually fill up with sand while someone's trapped in it? And so on. Having exhausted this line of inquiry, I just started feeling sorry for Cuthbert. I know I'm possibly in the minority here, but I thought she would have made a great Gwen Stacy for Spider-Man 3. Instead the part goes to the anemic but apparently more upmarket Bryce Dallas Howard, and Cuthbert gets this tripe. It's an old line, I know, but, Ms. Cuthbert, fire your agent.

— Glenn Kenny