Jennifer Tree (Elisha Cuthbert) is a fashion model whose face has graced countless magazines and ads, but she is finding life a lonely existence with only her pet dog Suzy for true companionship. Tonight she visits a nightclub for charity but her so-called friends stand her up, and she has to sip her apple martini alone there, with a bowl of something for Suzy to lap at, but somebody has put something in her drink. This makes her lapse into unconsciousness, but for some reason nobody goes to help her, and soon she has awoken in unfamiliar surroundings - where she cannot escape.
There's a lot that didn't make much sense about Captivity, and there were reasons for that, but one which many pondered over was how could the man who had directed The Killing Fields and The Mission be the same one reduced to shooting a cheapo Russian torture thriller two decades later? Roland Joffé, for it was he, had seen his career really slide from the time when he was helming prestige productions, and efforts like these looked more like the work of a man happy to get any job he could regardless of the quality of the script. But what made it more baffling was Larry Cohen, an expert in a neat thriller concept, had contributed to this.
Then you find out it was drastically rewritten from Cohen's original (the same had happened to Cellular), not before the film went before the cameras, but after, which should give you some idea of the choppy nature of the end result, and also why the production was riddled with continuity errors to the extent that it looked like art project made by a willfully awkward student who was rubbing the poorly realised efforts in your face. The trouble with that being we were meant to approach it as a glossy Hollywood suspenser, although with practically everything shot in a studio, it could have been made anywhere, the location didn't really matter. What did matter was how shoddy this was.
It was poorly received, not least because of a fatally misjudged advertising campaign which appeared to be glorifying the abduction and murder of its main character. Such was the bad vibes Captivity created that it pretty much halted a once-promising big screen acting career in its tracks: Cuthbert found high profile work in the movies hard to come by after this, and went back to television, though not in anything anywhere near as popular as realtime spy serial 24 which had made her name, for what it was worth. Here her most indelible image was being force fed a smoothie made of ears, eyes, and other body parts, the sort of indignity that made you feel sorry for the actress having to act out something so stupid.
Jennifer (was giving her the surname Tree a reference to how the producers thought Elisha's acting was doing?) wakes up in a cell, and proceeds to be knocked out or drugged for about a hundred times following that, or so it feels, making for monotonous viewing with only the degradation she goes through rendering it any way interesting. Even then, you'd likely be wondering how she manages to change outfits so regularly - at times in the space of one scene and back - and how she manages to scratch messages in the paint to her fellow captive Gary (Daniel Gilies) when both sides of the glass are painted, one of too many howlers which include the fate of the dog: we see Suzy get shot to pieces, then she shows up again (how?) for the baddie to torment Jennifer, who then apparently forgets she ever had a dog in the first place. With a twist concerning Gary you can see from orbit, and the fact that Cuthbert refused to do nude scenes but you do see Pruitt Taylor Vince's breasts, Captivity was one big slap in the face to the audience's intelligence. Music by Marco Beltrami.
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