Captivity (2007)

The purpose and meaning behind this godawful concoction can be quite easily gleaned from studying the film's big gore scenes. There's three of them worth noting, and they're all as queasy and disgusting as you'd imagine them to be. However, if you can divorce yourself from the content (which includes acid baths, blendered eyeballs and shotgunned poodles) and discern the context in which they exist, you'll find that there is none. These supergore scenes float free of the rest of the film, affecting the plot and character arcs in absolutely no way. They're just little suites of sickness, and they've pretty obviously been shot and inserted after the fact so that the film could potentially capitalize on the "torture porn" wave of films that have brought us the Hostel and Saw films, among others. In other words, this dumb, dumb movie is shallow opportunism at its crassest. Not that the gore scenes weren't, on some reptilian level, appreciated by my entertainment-starved brain -- at least trying to shoehorn Captivity in between Eli Roth and Rob Zombie gives the otherwise-generic and hopelessly boring film a reason to exist besides concrete proof that Elisha Cuthbert is a terrible actress and should never be employed again for any reason ever. But then, that's a pretty dubious fucking reason to exist. I'd be offended if this weren't so laughable.

Grade: D-