The worst emotional trap

All films exploit emotions; some do it honestly. Trapped is not one of them. Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend are a couple who have everything - he is a doc who pilots his own seaplane to house-calls, she is an interior designer.

They are thus ripe for fate to fall heavily on them, and it duly does when their five-year-old child is kidnapped by a low-rent couple (Kevin Bacon, the man with no cheekbones, and gaunt Courtney Love) and their obese accomplice (Pruitt Taylor Vince).

Seems they have a grievance against the doc to do with a child who died in an op. But the kidnapping is of less importance to the maker (director Luis Mandoki) of this nasty little job than the opportunity it provides for some perverted set-ups to do with the fatty's preparing to strangle the asthmatic child and the mother's vengeful threat to cut off Mr Bacon's balls with a blade she has hidden in her panties.

Rape, infanticide and castration are turned into cynical commercial teases. One's withers are duly wrung, but at the expense of all other competence in a movie where Courtney Love, instead of dutifully keeping the distraught dad under observation, takes a bubble bath and invites him to join her.

Trapped
Cert: 15