Captivity: Critic Reviews

[Joffe] brings an artful video-grunge look, and not much else, to this Saw clone.

Captivity the movie has been thoroughly eclipsed by Captivity the marketing.

The film itself is a very sorry and unthrilling piece of nastiness, peddling some pretty crass nonsense about what it imagines to be female psychology.

It's a Saw rip-off with less smarts. (Take a moment, please, to allow that sentence to sink in.)

It's not scary because not one second is believable.

The film itself is sordid, unpleasant viewing, as promised, yet more tedious than terrifying.

Destined to be better remembered for its grisly billboard imagery than for its relatively tame torture-porn tropes.

Slick, sick sleaze.

No acting, no pulse-pounding suspense, no humor or vicarious visceral thrills. There's a story, here, and not on the screen. It's about what happened to a once-fine filmmaker that brought him this low.

The real horror here is how anyone, especially a two-time Oscar nominated director, could be this hard up for work.

The controversy may have piqued the curiosity of horror fans but the film is undeserving of any further attention, managing to be both nastily unpleasant and laughably ludicrous.

Rarely have I found myself so uncomfortable viewing anything over such an extended period of time. There's nothing redeemable here. It's not tense or scary; it's just demented.

What made the esteemed director of The Killing Fields and The Mission stoop to this is anybody's guess.

A spirit-sapping exercise in female degradation fantasy.

There's something about Captivity that'll keep you watching; it could be your morbid curiosity, perhaps it's a sick bloodlust, or maybe, just maybe, it's because Elisha Cuthbert is clad in a low-cut dress at all times. My money's on all three.

The only smart move made by the filmmakers was casting Pruitt Taylor Vince as the torturer. Too bad you only get to see his face for a coupla minutes. Man, that's one freaky-lookin' dude.

[Joffe] makes us almost willing to overlook the unspeakable sadism of the first half -- but no, it's asking too much.

Without even calling into question the morals of a film which seems to exist only to depict the suffering of multiple women through hideous tortures, the film is still an empty mess, offering only a minor afterthought of an explanation to who is doing the

This rank-and-file entry in the new brutality (directed by an obviously disinterested Roland Joffe) is just a snooze.

Inexplicavel, como o director de A Missao pode ser tambem o responsavel por este filme vazio, estupido e repleto de momentos acidentalmente hilarios em funcao de sua imbecilidade.

You can afford to avoid Captivity.

Even in the fetid swamp of the torture porn genre, it stands out as a particularly awful movie.

Here we have little more than a grungy-looking TV movie of the week with some pointless gore tossed in.

Plunges the viewer almost directly into its nightmarish scenario.