Gunning for it: Malin Akerman in Catch .44
Watching the awkwardly named Catch .44, I surmised that it must be by a first-time writer and/or a first-time director, probably the same person — and one who worked on his sub-sub-Tarantino script for 15 years, at least, before it made its way to actual
celluloid.
As it happens, it’s the second film by writer-director Aaron Harvey, the first having been some trashy-looking horror called The Evil Woods, which he didn’t write. He wrote Catch .44, though, so he must take full responsibility for the staggering awfulness of it all.
Actually, the awfulness isn’t a surprise; what’s a surprise is that it didn’t go straight to DVD. Presumably the presence of Bruce Willis and Forest Whitaker in the cast helped the movie to get on to the big screens where, as we used to be told, everything is better.
It’s about a trio of young women (Malin Akerman, Nikki Reed and Deborah Ann Woll) who are controlled by a mystery man with a red telephone; we don’t see him at first, just his phone, his desk, and a strip of grey hair attached to his chin. This makes him seem like the Charlie of Charlie’s Angels and the three women doing his bidding a version of that trio of pulchritudinous crime-fighters.
Except that these three are in fact criminals, and their Charlie is someone called Mel (Willis). As the film begins, he has sent them on an errand related to a heap of drugs and a large stack of money, but it’s barely even an excuse for a plot.
The structure of the movie is heavily indebted to both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, though more the former than the latter. It has the crime situation and its aftermath and premath, as well as the “Mexican stand-off” so beloved of Quentin Tarantino and his epigones. This, some readers may recall, is the situation in which various characters all pull guns on each other at once, then, while pointing those guns at each other and threatening to shoot at any moment, engage in a long, complicated, repetitive conversation revolving around the phrase “What the fuck is going on?”
Good question. It will be asked not only by characters caught in this particular narrative but also by viewers watching the movie — if they have managed to stay awake long enough, or have not given up on this paceless plot and gone to do something more entertaining, like having a manicure or electroshock therapy.
Irrelevant nattering
The narrative line of Catch .44 is fractured, though not in any particularly intriguing way.
We go with the three young women into the truckstop where they are to make the drug-money connection, and watch as it goes horribly wrong. Then we screech to a halt and backtrack to an earlier moment, when all this nonsense began. Thereafter we move back and forth along this narrative timeline, reverting to the Mexican stand-off at the truckstop whenever required.
Then there’s more “What the fuck is going on?” and we’re off on some flashback or the like to provide a quasi-explanation for a situation we are unable in any way to care about.
Like what must surely be the crappiest and ickiest of Tarantino’s wankfests, Death Proof, this limp thriller is centred on a group of allegedly attractive young women who chatter on and on at each other, with an admixture of profanity, in a way that must be intended to echo the hilariously irrelevant nattering of characters such as Jules the assassin, the Samuel L Jackson character, in Pulp Fiction. Unfortunately, as in Death Proof, the endless backchat is not amusing. It’s just dull, dull, dull. And stoopid.
It feels like hours are going by as the story of Catch .44 stops so we can appreciate some pointless blather between Akerman, Reed and Woll, or just between Reed and Woll, who play sisters. Or we have to spend what feels like another hour watching Willis ham it up as the crime boss and exchange butchy non-witticisms with Akerman.
Such scenes are agonising in the boredom and cringing they induce — the sheer embarrassment of watching presumably conscious actors trying to speak this fake-hip dialogue is too much to bear. Had George W Bush’s torturers at Guantánamo Bay used these sequences instead of waterboarding on their captives, the war on terror would be long over.
Luckily for us, there’s not much Willis in the movie. There’s a lot of Akerman, however, making her the heroine or at least protagonist, but she is neither attractive enough nor possessed of sufficient personality to carry the movie. In fact, she drops it with a clang.
Whitaker, by contrast, amuses himself by working through a range of odd accents, much like Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks. Pity he couldn’t go further in his homage to that deeply weird, even destructive, multiperformance by the great mumbler, and try out a range of costumes — like, say, Brando’s Voortrekker kappie. That might have given Catch .44 a little fillip.
As it is, the only reason I can think of to watch Catch .44 is if you have a gun to your head.