Posted on: March 18, 2015 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

It seems like Ryan Reynolds can’t catch a break. He’s a good, often great actor, depending on the role. Not content to simply play the leading man to Sandra Bullock’s leading woman in one mindless romantic comedy after the next, he often seeks smaller, darker fare, which explains his choice with The Captive. Unfortunately this small-budget thriller, pairs solid acting with a weak, hard to follow plot.

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The movie, set somewhere in rural Canada (you can only guess based on the snow and desolation that cover just about every scene in this movie), casts Reynolds as the father of Cassandra, a girl in her early teens at the beginning of the movie. He leaves his daughter in the truck as he stops into a diner to pick up pie and she vanishes. The movie, caught up in its own attempt to be seen as creative, then jumps back and forth eight years, but seeing as how none of the characters have aged accepted for the daughter, it’s jarring and more than a little confusing to try and juggle the timelines.

His daughter was taken by a group of well-connected pedophiles, but we learn very little else about them. Rosario Dawson plays the detective in charge of the investigation, and while she does an impressive job of breathing life into this one-dimensional character, it seems like she was added by the writer as little more than an afterthought.

The Captive/112 mins./Lionsgate/2015

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