The Cap­tor

This is a text­book case of when an actor clear­ly gives it their all and it real­ly doesn’t count for squat. Robert Budreau’s mis­fir­ing heist com­e­dy places at its cen­tre Ethan Hawke, sport­ing a mop top and han­dle­bar ​’stache, who has, we can only spec­u­late, been advised to ​“go full Nic Cage” and scream every line of dia­logue like the boom mic is just out of range. We have bulging head veins, rivulets of sweat and even that old act­ing sta­ple – the fly­ing rage spit­tle. Ini­tial­ly, the high ener­gy is bear­able, but after an hour it’s clear that all that noise is over­com­pen­sat­ing for a con­sid­er­able lack of pur­pose elsewhere.

Yet Hawke’s deci­bel both­er­ing turn as pet­ty crim Lars Nys­trom (based on real life rob­ber Jan-Erik Ols­son) drains all the air out of this would-be ser­vice­able recre­ation of a real 1973 raid on Stockholm’s Kred­it­banken, which would even­tu­al­ly be used to define the afflic­tion we now refer to as Stock­holm Syn­drome. Despite his being loud and proud, Hawke’s char­ac­ter quick­ly draws the amorous atten­tions of prim clerk Bian­ca (Noo­mi Rapace), yet their bur­geon­ing love is test­ed by the wily siege-break­ing tac­tics of the chilled police chief (Christo­pher Hey­er­dahl) who wants Lars and his accom­plice Gun­nar (Mark Strong) back behind bars.

The film’s orig­i­nal title was ​‘Stock­holm’, but it has since been altered to the tedious­ly gener­ic ​‘The Cap­tor’, per­haps a sign that any deep­er explo­ration into the psy­chol­o­gy of the sit­u­a­tion, or the how or why cap­tives fall in love with their cap­tors, is deliv­ered as an airy-fairy after­thought. When Bianca’s hus­band arrives in the bank and man­ful­ly requests to trade places with her, he’s quick­ly shown to be an inad­e­quate boob. He asks her how she goes about feed­ing the kids, which she explains with a gun to her head. Lars knows the score straight away.

Despite the fact that he’s fir­ing off a sub-machine gun and is clear­ly a hopped up lunatic, Lars is pre­sent­ed as a lov­able rogue – a dream­er, no less! – who’s a lit­tle messed-up in the head, and what he’s doing is just small-time high jinx that, essen­tial­ly, means well. The way Budreau writes the char­ac­ter (and Hawke plays him), there is no wig­gle room for ambi­gu­i­ty, or any inter­nal strug­gle between con­flict­ing impuls­es of vio­lence and romance. Some­where along the line, it was decid­ed this was going to be a throw­away farce, and any sense of wider import just drained out of the mate­r­i­al. So let’s just shout this one across the fin­ish line.