It’s the question nobody asked but Captivity has answered. What sort of Saw-style genre movie can I dish out that would be suitable for 10 year olds and complete pansies?

The answer? Why Captivity of course. Don’t let the aggressive advertising campaign and Joss Whedon’s protestations fool you, this film is about as bloody and nasty as a French poodle at the annual crufts meeting, and when the only card a film has goes AWOL you know you’re in serious trouble.

What’s that you say? This film could have other positive attributes then being a warmed up Saw rip-off? Alas you won’t find any in this train wreck excuse for cinematic entertainment, but for the sake of completion and to bore you with plot details this is the basic breakdown.

Elisha Cuthbert plays Jennifer Tree, a successful and unsurprisingly vapid supermodel who through a crappy twist of faith ends up captured by a sadistic individual clothed in black robe and gloves. She becomes his latest plaything, a piece of flesh to torture if you will, unfortunately for the film he has all the edge of a plastic knife which ends up making him as scary as Dakota Fanning (Hide and Seek also provided massive evidence for this). Along the way we pick up a second male prisoner, and inevitably he and Elisha bond and so on so forth, just pick up a genre cliché book if you want to know more.

Indeed this film doesn’t just telegraph its plot twists, it rips up the Broadband backbone for General Electric and uses that instead. Even within the confines of by the books horror this film takes the extreme Mikey. The Khmer Rouge spied in Joffe’s film “The Killing Fields” had more subtly.

But as I said at the start of this review it’s the utter toothlessness of the main villain that reduces this film to the realms of abject disaster. Granted films like the Saw series or Eli Roth’s Hostel are nothing more then set pieces in search of a story, but at least they carried through on their promise of blood and lots of it. Captivity is a painful cocktease, hell it doesn’t even have the balls to kill a little dog for goodness sake.

Some people might be pleased by this but at the end of the day you must judge films inside their own genre conventions, and Captivity fails in every aspect. On a pure enjoyment level it’s about as much fun as walking through Zimbabwe with a large placard that reads “I’m an affluent white farmer that bull whips my man servants for pleasure”.

On the scale of the worse theatrically released films of 2007 it’s barely ahead of the spawn of Satan’s backside known as Epic Movie. To borrow a phrase from fellow WOKJ reviewer and columnist Loyal Mehnert it doesn’t even qualify as a film.

If you’re a genre fan steer well clear, Saw 4 is only a few months away, if the craving becomes too great just pick up something that does the genre proud like “Severance”, because in the end the only person that ends up in pain with this film is the viewer.