1 gibble out of 5
Director: Aaron Harvey
Whoosh and bedazzle! Brucey made a couple bad movies recently. Hint: Catch .44 was one of them.
Look: I don’t worship Tarantino. But I totally agree that he’s made some excellent films that exemplify great visual stories. They don’t have to have deeper meaning (and, if anything, when he plays at deeper meaning is when things seem silly), but they tell a great story. Director Aaron Harvey totally loved Pulp Fiction, and probably Resevoir Dogs, and he’d probably quote something typically classic like Kubrick as an influence. It’s not that Catch .44 is incompetent in presentation, it just lacks it’s own soul.
So there’s some plot about three girls, including Malin Akerman, who are drug runners for some mob bossy guy who is probably Bruce Willis. The girls are talking in a diner in a typically frank, Tarantino-esque manner – except less tasteful application of f-bombs and less understanding of how this off-topic conversation tactic works as a film technique – when things switch to ‘business’ and then a shootout starts. Sound sort of similar to Pulp Fiction? Maybe. Maybe the likeness continues when our story flashes back to several hours prior to tell us how the girls ended up at the diner.
The success of Pulp Fiction lies in its establishment of characters, then telling stories involving those characters. That the stories happen to intersect is almost unimportant except that it engages the viewer in watching the film even more. Catch .44 has no likeable characters. Akerman and her crew are foul-mouthed and stupid, and we are given no reason in that initial scene to give an ounce of puppy poo what they’re doing and why. The time jumping of the plot (forward and back, forward and back) has no purpose except to extend runtime – again, as a viewer, we are given no real feeling of intrigue to cause us to wonder what happened several hours prior, our two years prior, or whatever.
Forest Whitaker shows up as a confusing character who fulfills the ‘crazy, quirky’ role, but is either miscast or mis-directed and ends up being as uninterestingly long-winded and fuck-word-filled as every other character.
I will say some positives: I haven’t seen Bruce Willis in a role like this in… ever. As the mob boss (whose name has already escaped me, though I recently watched the film), or the drug kingpin or whatever he is, Bruce plays an old, quirky coot who’s a few degrees of his comedic persona but is meant to have an undercurrent of menace and/or swagger that Bruce would normally use his smirk to represent. But there’s no smirk, and there’s none of the Bruce Willis posing that is frequent even in his best roles. This is perhaps the only positive comparison to Pulp Fiction, that director Aaron Harvey got Mr. Willis in a lower budget film and got him to act off-type (In ‘Fiction’ he wasn’t as unrecognizable, but Tarantino got him much more stoic than he had been up to that point).
Secondly, though the actually arrangement of sequences is stupid, the editing style is fun and I wished they had used it more. Flashbacks are transitioned to with a old-styley degradation technique that, when they transition from the very opening scene (which is a short Bruce Willis dialogue moment that actually could’ve been interesting), I had hopes for the movie.
But overall, this is sad. You love something, and you emulate it. But whereas the ‘VHS-generation’ was learning this stuff from the ground up, ‘Catch .44’ reeks of the generation where things come too easily. I’m never claiming that getting financing and making a movie is simple, but there is the difference that I can pick up a movie quality camera within a year’s salary and download some movie editing software that will produce the ‘look’ of a studio film. Harvey’s not a young buck, exactly, IMDB has him as being born in 1980, but the swear-filled dialogue and bare bones plot that plays at being something more reek of a youth first discovering naughty words and proudly putting an “it was all a dream” twist to the end of some Pulp Fiction fan-fiction.
Lastly: that title. Maybe it’s a gun reference I don’t understand. To my knowledge, it’s not mentioned in the film. If I’m guessing, it’s a spin on Catch-22 with a gun-caliber number instead. Fine, you’re stepping on my toes again because Joseph Heller is my favorite author, but Harvey maybe needs to re-read the book to get a refresher course on what the phrase implies.
"Fuck fuck fuck, fuck fuck."
vaguely-offensive 