Movie trailer review: Captivity

The full movie trailer for Captivity is now online, and what can one say... it looks pretty dumb. Not all too different than films like Saw and Hostel, in that it is about a young woman (Elisha Cuthbert) who is captured by a madman and tortured, Captivity looks to add nothing new to the genre.

Captivity has already stirred controversy when After Dark placed pictures of a dead and tortured Cuthbert on billboards in Los Angeles (I think it was LA), which 1) was a smart move in that it got itself some free publicity and 2) it tells us that the main character most likely dies.

Anyway, Captivity could presumably be clever if done right, but Cuthbert isn't a strong enough actress (or at least she hasn't proven it thus far) to carry a film like this on her own, and the movie is going to have too much shock and gore for its own good. If one of these films attempted to take the psychological angle and extract an award-winning performance from its leading actor, that would be pretty damn cool, but these studios are all just trying to make some money by showing young, hot actors getting killed off in gruesome ways.

I'm not someone who gets easily upset about gore, and I actually like gore in films, even if it gratuitous, but I'm getting pretty damned bored with this torture sub-genre that was never very good to begin with.

As for the Captivity movie trailer, it isn't overly successful in many ways. It perhaps shows too much, and is too frenetic to be very effective. This one will flop.