Nicely played.

I just watched The Captive, the new flick from a fellow Canadian, Atom Egoyan. I've come to find, after watching I believe 3 or 4 movies that he's directed, that I'm not high on this guy. I apparently liked Felicia's Journey but I don't even remember what it is (I only know I saw it because I rated it on Criticker), and Chloe was okay, but I hated The Captive.

This is a movie about a little girl who gets kidnapped. This should be crushing because this is one of the saddest, most personal tales you can tell in movies, but I felt nothing here. I didn't even care.

First of all, the main villain was just over the top. Everything he did, from his hushed speaking to his appearance just screamed, "Hey look I did it!" I guess in the reality of the movie, you couldn't just pick him up because he looked like a pedo and drag him in, but the irrationality of one of the cops made it pretty clear that this was not a film based in reality. The script let this one down really hard, and I actually like Ryan Reynolds and don't think he did a terrible job... but he couldn't save it.

The one good thing about The Captive is the atmosphere. Snowy Canada is perfect for something like this because it's dark, depressing and symbolic. The film was competently shot, and normally something like that has weight with me but the plot holes and the writing in general was so terrible I just couldn't do it. I can't give this above a 2.5.

So yeah, 2.5/10.