NEWS: An Invitation...To Captivity

Arriving in theaters front-loaded with a controversial billboard campaign (depicting the "abduction," "confinement," "torture" and "termination" of its star) as well as a rare censure from the Motion Picture Association of America, "Captivity" the movie has been thoroughly eclipsed by "Captivity" the marketing.

Which is, of course, what the film's producers are probably hoping. Outrage, whether issuing from feminist groups or the writer-director Joss Whedon %u2014 who has likened the movie's trailer to a recent CNN report on the public stoning of a young Kurdish woman %u2014 only fans the opening-weekend grosses. By the time those heightened expectations are dashed (What? No chain saw?), the money is in and the sequel already in the works. There are no refunds on your innocence.

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The person who ought to be most embarrassed by this airless dud is its director, Roland Joffé, a two-time Oscar nominee who in the space of just five years regressed from working with Tom Stoppard to associating with the kind of people who mix eyeball smoothies and force-feed them to defenseless women. To be fair to Mr. Joffé, however, the movie has reportedly undergone substantial alterations since its filming in Moscow in 2005. Perhaps he's as disgusted by the eyeballs as we are.

Despite the controversy, "Captivity" is no more than a desperate attempt to cling to the buzz of "Saw" before fans are distracted by the next shiny power tool. Like good sex, good horror requires mystery and imagination %u2014 you can give a villain a blender, brain damage and a closetful of slut-wear and he may still bore you to death. As for Ms. Cuthbert, having passed most of her time as Jack Bauer's daughter on "24" in one sort of confinement or another, she knows the victim ropes better than most. "Elisha's strength is in her fan base," says one of the film's producers. I just knew it had to be somewhere.