As bland as its title, Captive is an indifferent home invasion thriller in which a drug-addicted single mom is held hostage by a desperate man who’d just murdered four people. Hostage movies follow such age-old patterns that it’s rare to be surprised by one and Captive is no exception. Occasionally the genre will be transformed by brilliant filmmaking, as it was in something like The Desperate Hours or Dog Day Afternoon. Not this time. The true subject should have been given energy but all I felt while watching Captive was a big yawn.

Taking place over a single day, Captive closely follows an event that took place in Atlanta in 2005. Brian Nichols (played by David Oyelowo) was on trial for rape when he overpowered and beat a female guard, then took her gun. He calmly walked into a courtroom and fatally shot a judge and a court reporter...