Captive

Why do based-on-a-true-story movies insist on finishing up with images of the real life characters?

It blunts the immersive experience and pulls he film too close to a made-for-TV movie. Captive director Jerry Jameson has been a TV director-for-hire since the early seventies with only the likes of Airport ’77 making it to the big screen. Jameson can’t shake loose the feel of television from Captive, a tonally inconsistent thriller capped off by an end-credit sequence interview between the real Ashley Smith and… wait for it… Oprah. Gah!

Smith (Mara, House of Cards) is a single mother whose daughter lives with her aunt because of Smith’s addiction to meth. She’s trying to get her act together – new job, new gaff – but she still keeps enough for a few lines hidden away at home for those long evenings. Meanwhile, Brian Nichols (Oyelowo, Selma) doesn’t fancy the twenty year stretch he’s facing so just before his hearing he pummels to death the cop that’s escorting him to his holding cell, takes her gun, shoots the judge, and goes on the run. One or two scrapes/killings later and he turns up at Smith’s house looking to lay low…

Movie Theory #258: A film will hint of its upcoming naffness with one particular scene. When you see two characters get out of a car and have a conversation they would have had not only in the drive over, but before they even got in the car, then it’s a sure fire sign that there will be bum notes ahead. Here it’s a rather stiff Williams and Rogers, detectives on the case, discussing what they’re doing and why they’re at a destination just as they knock on Nichols’ ex’s door. What did they talk about on the drive over if not this? Why get in the car in the first place? Did one of them say, Let’s go for a spin? and they just wound up here? A bum note what will herald more.

For a home invasion thriller, there is a surprising lack of tension in the scenes between victim and invader. In adapting Ashley Smith’s book writer Brian Bird (Not Easily Broken) does the right thing in laying a lot of pipe: considerable time is given over to Smith’s addiction and the predicament she’s in, while Nichols is sold as a violent criminal but one whose first instinct when on the run is visit his new born son. However this depth and dynamic fails to generate the requisite drama when the action is confined to Smith’s house. It becomes flat, disengaging. Even the silly Idris Elba/Taraji P. Henson home invasion thriller No Good Deed had a bit of edge about it before it gloriously fell apart.

Despite these shortcomings Jameson does cook up an exciting escape sequence and both Mara and Oyelowo (ropey drug meltdown aside) are hard at work to make Captive somewhat watchable.