Ryan Reynolds Gets Lost in the Snow in Atom Egoyan's Flubbed Thriller The Captive
If you take the techno-voyeurism of Speaking Parts, the disturbing sexuality of Exotic, and the children in peril of The Sweet Beyond, put them in a blender, and pour them over ice, you end up with The Captive, a movie too absurd to take seriously, but too weird. to ignore her.
Ryan Reynolds leads a curious ensemble as a bearded Canadian father desperate to find his kidnapped daughter in Atom Egoyan's strange new disappointment that is painfully reminiscent of his best previous work. The missing girl, Cass (Peyton Kennedy), is a precocious 10-year-old up-and-coming ice skater. A conversation she has with her father about the necessary tricks (just one of many twisted metaphors) may be Egoyan trying to cover up for himself. Once again, he cuts through the timeline, turning much of The Captive into audience detective work as we try to piece the puzzle together. (Don't worry, there are also puzzle pictures in the movie.) What's unfortunate is that once the story starts to make sense, she collapses under her own ridiculous weight. This is hard meat, but instead of reveling in its De Palma-esque sleaze, The Captive wants to play it cold and straight. However, not everyone got that memo and Kevin Durand portrays his perverted computer whiz as if he's trying to top Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Involuntary laughter is the only reasonable response.
Durand is at the center of an asexual pedophile network. He and his clients seem to love taking personal stories from defenseless people. Also, they have access (somehow) to the shocked parents' surveillance cameras. Teenage Cass (Alexia Fast) lives in a furnished dungeon for a total of eight years, narrating into a microphone and suffering from a raging case of Stockholm syndrome. The absurdity of the setup — let's call it Young Girl instead of Old Guy — it's compounded by the fact that all the computer interfaces are infuriatingly fake. When video conferencing sessions end, the words CONNECTION TERMINATED do not appear in huge red letters. When you can't believe that your master criminal is actually capable of doing his nefarious deeds (and the childish fleece sweaters, goofy pencil mustache, and falsetto arias don't help) it's impossible to suspend disbelief.
Meanwhile, in a completely different film, Reynolds and his aggrieved wife (Mireille Enos, best of this picture) are playing their hearts out in a bitter drama. Also doing their thing are Scott Speedman (a red flag for the quality of any film, frankly) and Rosario Dawson leading a special police unit that gets results, dammit!
The coincidences and conspiracies are too far-fetched for the real world, but the arc of police and parents wants to tug at your heartstrings. Egoyan shoots his interiors well (glass hotels in Niagara, wooden houses) and gives it an art house sheen, but the ridiculousness of the story isn't up to par.
There are two really good scenes in this movie. One is the dark moment in which Reynolds discovers that his daughter has been kidnapped. Shot from afar and off to the side of a noisy, snowbanked road, it's a stunning realization of a terrifying nightmare. The other highlight is when a villain in an absurd dragon maid wig at a costume ball actually puts poisonous powder in someone's drink. They may also be tying a damsel to the train tracks. The problem with The Captive is that there is no connective tissue between these two extremes. Dissonance is not, as I am sure Egoyan expects, a bewildering mix of styles. It's just bad movie making.
