Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The plot? Reynolds has the worst landscaping job in the world in permafrost Canada while Enos is the worst housekeeper in the world, spending her days pacing instead of cleaning hotel rooms. Both are unhappily married since their daughter was abducted while he bought pie. Enos overacts and screams at him for years while ignoring the incompetent police detectives who take turns in acting as a therapist to her and general pain in the ass to him. Hope is almost gone for the missing kid - and the audience - when a stereotypical child abductor hatches his master plan that has something to do with 1990s chatrooms and the Internet. And somehow he also put cameras in all the hotel rooms where Enos works. Meanwhile two police detectives spend times ewwwwing each other with sicko pictures instead of 'detecting' and seem to do everything other than solving crime. All of this happens in snow. The film cannot decide what to focus on so it just does everything all at once, $4.99 buffet-style. We get some half-baked attempt at a police procedural though clearly the writers have never seen any other cop show let alone researched actual police work, so the twist is that the police are incompetent and just continuously harass the father of the missing kid. Then we get the half-cocked "my kid is missing" emotional story from Reynolds and Enos, neither of which has any material to work with and quickly exhaust the generic misery setup. The bad guy really isn't bad enough and looks like he could have been beaten up by the kid at any time if she'd just wanted to leave. It's hard to put into words how bad this is but needless to say that The Captive manages to misfire on all cylinders at once. In taking an amateur script that should have never made production, it adds some wooden acting and risible dialog from actors who can do much better, and finally edits the mediocre result together with time-jumping tricks that are completely out of place in this sort of mundane made-for-TV story. Without a single likable character in the film or anyone behaving consistent with logic or reason (even the kidnappee seems pretty happy), it's a two-hour exercise in eye-rolling, face-palming and shouting insults at the TV. If you hang in there hoping at least for a satisfying ending, disappointment is served in spades. The filmmakers, knowing that even a big train wreck has to end somehow, opt for the least plausible way to put this fire out - I shouldn't say too much in order to keep this spoiler-free but I just want you to know it doesn't get any better. In a year of pretty dreadful movie choices generally, The Captive will hopefully be first in line at the Razzie Awards. I would like to know how the bad guy got a power source to all those hidden cameras though.