Proof of Life (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

David Morse plays a globe-trotting engineer who is building a dam in a fictitious South American country when he is captured by guerillas and held for ransom. The captors are not leftists or terrorists with a political agenda. They are entrepreneurs who use hostages as an additional profit center, to go with their coca fields. His wife (Meg Ryan) struggles to get him back after the kidnapping, and Crowe is her only hope.

It's not a bad film at all. It looks great. It is acted effectively. It has some great scenes.

• The (ostensibly unconsummated) romance between Crowe and Ryan was tacked on as if an afterthought, and it was completely inappropriate. Ryan was distraught over her husband's situation. Slipping into an attraction with the rescuer was an infidelity that makes us like her character a lot less. How would you like it if you were captured and tortured by terrorists, and your wife was back in a soft bed in an expensive apartment making nice-nice with Russell Crowe? It is said that the director filmed a sex scene between them, but wisely cut it. It would have been completely inappropriate, and would have caused us to hate both of them for their cavalier disregard of the husband's situation.
• The movie is long (135 minutes), and the story could be much more compact. In the set-up phase, Crowe is seen rescuing a hostage in Chechnya. This established his character, and showed how the captors and the local governments all try to swindle the negotiators, but had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story. It could easily have been excised. The same points were made later in the story when Crowe had to leave the case for reasons too complicated to detail here, and a local negotiator took over temporarily. In fact, that first scene sort of telegraphed that Crowe would eventually abandon the negotiations and just take the husband back in a guerilla raid, so the entire process of hostage negotiations seemed to drag on for no purpose. And watching a negotiation is far less entertaining than watching guys raid a mountain camp. During the boring, interminable negotiations, I kept waiting for Russ to get off his duff. There is also a lot of unnecessary badinage between the wife and her sister-in-law. I can't think of any reason why they didn't cut the sister-in-law out of the script entirely.

In fact, if I were charged to make a re-write on this, I would have either:

a. cut out the sister-in-law entirely to shave running time and make the film more taut

or

b. switched Meg Ryan to the sister-in-law role, make her unmarried, and let Crowe have an affair with her, which would have been completely sympathetic, completely understandable, and would have allowed the wife to stay focused on her husband. 

I prefer solution A to make it a more solid action film, but Hollywood would probably have chosen solution B if they had thought of it.

But the big disappointment is that it did not include any deleted scenes.

The rumored sex scene between Ryan and Crowe was nowhere to be seen,

Whether it was the right decision to cut the footage, whether the footage exists - all that doesn't matter. What does count is that we don't get to see it, one way or t'other.