Crime dramas based on real-life cases have to hew a careful line when dealing with their subject matter. It’s also important to find the right cast, and director Jerry Jameson has some solid choices in David Oyelowo, Kate Mara, Mimi Rogers and Leonor Varela for **Captive{
With a script by Brian Bird and Reinhard Denke adapted from Ashley Smith’s memoir An Unlikely Angel, Captive finds Oyelowo as Brian Nichols, a prisoner who broke out of a courthouse jail cell in Atlanta in 2005, shot dead the judge and several others in the court and fled.
Hiding out from a manhunt, he took Smith hostage in her own apartment. Despite her own struggles with meth addiction and trying to raise her family as a single mother, Smith managed to reason with Nichols using Rick Warren’s advice book A Purpose Driven Life. Jameson is set to roll the cameras later this month.
Oyelowo is enjoying praise for his role in L****ee Daniels’ The Butler (known simply as **The Butler **over here) and is at work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Mara has her own Nolan connection: she’s worked on regular Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister’s directorial debut, Transcendence.