Captive
The latest edition to the emerging genre of 'faith-based-on-a-true-story' films for the evangelical set, Captive recounts the harrowing ordeal of real-life former drug addict Ashley Smith (Kate Mara), who was held at gunpoint by convicted rapist Brian Nichols (David Oyelowo) in her suburban Atlanta home in March 2005. After murdering multiple people during a daring courthouse escape and psychologically torturing her for seven hours in a fit of meth-fuelled paranoia, Nichols, according to Smith, (non-fiction spoiler alert) let her simply walk away after she read him inspirational lines from God-fearing self-help book The Purpose Driven Life (how’s that for effective product placement?).
Mara (The Fantastic Four) and, especially, Oyelowo (Selma) help elevate a workmanlike script and direction – it’s strange to see the latter, such a rising star, in the service of such a middling production – but in the end Captive, unsurprisingly, seems more concerned with delivering empty platitudes than with even beginning to address the complex root causes of human suffering. To top it off, the movie-as-book-advert ruse actually backfires. The film fails to convince that the reason for Oyelowo’s murderer’s surrender is due to his own God-ordained purpose rather than just because of the pointlessness of it all.