Michael Ledo This is the true story of "courage" of drug addict Ashley Smith (Kate Mara) whose home was invaded by Brian Nichols (David Oyelowo) a rather polite cop killer who had escaped from Fulton Co. jail. Ashley reads to him a couple of lines from "A Purpose Driven Life" and he allows her to leave and then gives himself up to the cops. That is pretty much it. Ashley had ample opportunity to escape at numerous other occasions and chose not to do so, as many people speculated the two people had known each other, i.e. drug dealings previously. In this version of the story they are complete strangers. The film gets preachy during the epilogue, but wasn't too bad during the film. Unfortunately this was basically a two man play with boring characters and dialogue.The film is liked by those who enjoy faith based films.Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity.

Leofwine_draca CAPTIVE is a rather boring low budget thriller that fails to offer up much in the way of thrills or depth, despite having a startling opening sequence depicting a violent jail break. It's essentially a two hander between Kate Mara and David Oyelowo, the latter of whom plays an escaped rapist who ends up in Mara's home and takes her hostage. All good so far, but then the film turns into a lengthy, rambling sermon that seems to have been designed to advertise The Purpose-Driven Life, one of those Christian self-help books. As such, it feels more than a little preachy, as well as dull.

jimbo-53-186511 Recovering meth-addict and single mother Ashley Smith (Kate Mara) finds herself in a perilous life or death situation when she is taken hostage in her own home by escaped and wanted felon Brian Nichols (David Oyelowo). Based on a true story, Captive follows Ashley over a 7 hour period highlighting her attempts to survive this terrifying ordeal.In some ways I actually admire this film as it does at least try to avoid many of the clichés that plague home-invasion thrillers (perhaps being based on a true story may be the reason that it partly succeeds in this respect). Rather than being a ridiculous film that shows the victim trying to escape in increasingly preposterous and unlikely ways the narrative here has a much more slow-burning approach to it - essentially it shows the victim and the captor conversing and as things progress it turns out that they actually both share some common ground. For someone like me (who's unfamiliar with the real life case) this did make the film interesting and at the very least made it watchable. Whilst I'm happy to commend the filmmakers for employing this approach it does sadly come at the expense of any real excitement, tension or suspense. I appreciate that this is based on a true story and that perhaps what we're presented with here may well be an 'accurate' portrayal of actual events, but in reality having very little going on outside of the rather incisive narrative does mean that the film starts to drag and feel boring.The performances from Mara and Oyelowo are both very good (with the latter being excellent) and the generally non clichéd approach to the material mean that it is nowhere near as ridiculous or far-fetched as other films in the genre (the only ridiculous part to this film lay with Nichols escape, but this was a minor problem which I feel can just about be tolerated in the name of 'suspension of disbelief').Captive is the sort of film that I would say is worth a look (if nothing else due to the fact that it's based on a true story). The narrative is interesting enough to make it watchable and the performances are good, but it really needed more in the way of excitement, tension and suspense and the absence of these things is what lets it down slightly.

The Couchpotatoes It started all nice and I really thought it was going to be action and pursuits all the time but it quickly came down to a point I was just watching the movie with not much interest. When they finally started to speak about God and all that kind of crap it lost my attention completely and I just hoped the movie would end faster. Not that the actors were bad or so. They all did their job like they should but the story is just not good enough to be memorable even if it is based on a true story. I just wished it was not based on a true story and that they would have left the God thing out of the movie and maybe then it would have been something better and different. Now the end was just not good enough, certainly not when you saw the first steps of the criminal in the beginning. Good to watch once and then forget about it.