2011 hasn’t been nearly as good a year to Bruce Willis as years past. With a handful of films he’s had roles in going direct to video, Willis is no longer a guarantee that a film will reach theatres in a proper release it seems. After Setup had a stellar cast and went DTV, it’s no surprise that Catch .44 did the same as well. And it’s for a good reason: it’s a wannabe Tarantino thriller more than a decade after it became passé.
Three women (Nikki Reed, Malin Ackerman, Deborah Ann Woll) wind up in a diner on a job. Set to intercept a large money deal, the encounter is supposed to go nice and easy. When bullets start flying, and a double cross seems imminent, what’s supposed to be a quick robbery of a drug dealer and a money man turns out to be significantly more complicated and violent than they ever expected. Throw in Forest Whitaker and Willis in to make it more interesting than it deserves to be and you have what ought to be the start of a late 90s Tarantino film. How so?
Flashing back to the set up of the diner shootout, and moving back and forth between what’s happening now and how everyone got there, Aaron Harvey is going for a Pulp Fiction vibe with signature Tarantino style moments of conversation. Toss in some gratuitous and over the top violence, plenty of profanity and an off-beat location and you have something that QT could’ve made back when he was exploring the crime genre prolifically.
The problem is that it’s so openly aping QT that it doesn’t find its own vibe as a film. Harvey is trying to be too cutesy about it all, openly giving cues to the entire Tarantino library in the same way J.J Abrams did earlier this year with Super 8. And that film suffers from the same problems this one does: it’s too busy trying to recreate older, similar things we remember vividly from better films instead of trying to forge its own path.
It gets a little bothersome after a while because the film is trying to ape famous moments but it doesn’t do it in any sort of memorable or clever way. It becomes tedious after a while. Harvey is too busy trying to mimic someone else that he never finds anything distinctive or individualistic of his own
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