CAPTIVES A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): **
Rachel Clifford once had a husband, but now she's got a lover instead. She and her husband split up recently after she found out that he was having an affair. So she has taken up with a man named Philip Chaney, who broke up with his ex-wife after he found out that she was having an affair.
This little soap opera of affairs on top of affairs is even more complicated because of Rachel and Philip's current situations. She is a part-time dentist at a male prison in Britain, where Philip is a prisoner. Soon after he comes to her with grinding-teeth syndrome, they begin to get the hots for each other. Since Philip is on a program where he can leave the prison one day a week to go to college, there are more opportunities than just the dental chair to become intimate with each other. (They manage clandestinely to fondle each other so much in the chair that viewers may come to think of the dental office in an entirely different way.)
Julie Ormond plays Rachel, and Tim Roth is Philip in the 1994 movie CAPTIVES. Ormond has gotten few good roles to display her talents other than SABRINA. Roth, on the other hand, plays basically the same evil character, and quite well, in most of his films (HOODLUM, PULP FICTION, ROB ROY), but the best is his self-parody role in the Woody Allen musical EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU.
As Rachel and Philip begin an improbable romance, and she literally lets her hair down when she comes through the visitor's rather than the staff entrance to see him one visiting day.
Their trysting spot is a women's restroom at a bus stop, where they engage in passionate and intense, but not particularly graphic, sex. Soon Rachel doesn't just like Philip, she is sending him erotic tapes to listen to in the comfort of his prison cell.
Given his long lack of female companionship, the fact that Philip falls for someone as beautiful as Rachel is completely believable, but that she would fall for the crude looking and acting Philip is pretty hard to buy. Badly miscast, Roth is convincing as a prisoner but not as an irresistible lover.
In the film's least believable aspect, she's willing to risk her job and his upcoming release to have sex with him in public places, but she doesn't feel that she knows him well enough to be able to ask him why he was sent to prison in the first place. Sure. It's halfway through the story before she finally gets up the courage to find out what he did, and by then you can probably guess his crime.
Another hard to fathom part is the way Rachel leaves all of the sharp instruments of her trade in plain view so that the prisoners could easily steal them.
Not nearly creepy enough and only sporadically romantic, the film drifts along in fits and spurts. CAPTIVES's director Angela Pope is much better in her subsequent film, the devastating HOLLOW REED.
The last act of CAPTIVES is the best as the tension finally ratchets up when Rachel begins to experience some of the dangers involvement with the criminal element of society.
CAPTIVES runs 1:40. It is rated R for a strong sex scene, profanity and violence and would be fine for older and mature teenagers.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews