This Taylor Hackford effort started out as a movie based on a magazine article about a true story and has since evolved into tabloid stories about the romance between stars Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe that began during the shooting. Call it a trash-imitates-life-imitates-art-imitates-life thing.

The story lost in this morass is pretty standard, and the frisson added by the cast members' extracurricular activities doesn't spark it much. South American revolutionaries capture Peter (David Morse), an idealistic engineer whose shifty company waffles on the ransom demands. Peter's semi-estranged wife, Alice (Ryan), talks hostage negotiator Terry (Crowe) into working her husband's release, and they fall in love, sort of. Actually, the only proof we get are a couple of lingering close-ups, a smooch, and a comment from Terry's pal Dino (a self-consciously scene-stealing David Caruso); most of their shared screen time has Terry squabbling with the kidnappers on the phone while Alice frets in the background. More intriguing is Hackford's use of unchronological parallel editing, in which consecutive events are shown happening either simultaneously or in inverse order, and Peter's penchant for getting his lower extremities impaled by pointed pieces of wood while lingering in captivity, Survivor-style, in the Andes. Proof of Life proves only that anything but life can be a concern of studio filmmaking.