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Printer-Friendly ModePoor script, dull characters plague Catch and Release
January 29, 2007 —
Catch and Release is a movie that is part romantic comedy, part drama, and all tiresome. It isn't offensively bad, but it failed to provide any impetus for me to direct more than the most transitory attention and care to the events onscreen.
Jennifer Garner plays Gray Wheeler, a woman whose fiancee has just died in an accident. Surrounded by the friends of the departed (apparently she has no friends of her own), she goes through a struggle to come to terms both with his death and with new information that she discovers about his life.
Surprises abound early in the movie, though, as Gray discovers many things she didn't know about the deceased. His bank account had about one million dollars more in it than she or his friends had imagined, and a greater surprise still, he apparently had a child in Los Angeles. Much of the beginning scenes involve Gray and the friends of her former husband-to-be attempting to piece together the pieces of this puzzle.
The three best friends of Grady, the fiancee, are for the most part quite uninteresting. Yes, the fiancee was named Grady, a name removed from that of Gray's by only one letter, making it even more difficult to keep names straight amongst a collage of faceless characters.
In a rare appearance as a character other than Silent Bob, Kevin Smith plays Sam, the only interesting character in the movie. Despite being the goofy-yet-tender friend stock character, he carries enough charismatic weight in his performance to win me over, which is more than can be said of the other performances.
Jennifer Garner has shown a certain charm in the past, most notably in 13 Going on 30. But here, like in the tragic affair that was Daredevil, she is not given a role that allows her to shine.
The bafflingly cast Timothy Olyphant appears frequently to bombard any momentum a scene may have had into oblivion, and Sam Jaeger is given a role that would make any actor look bad. Juliette Lewis, too, is victimized by a ruthless script that gives her not a character, but a cruel caricature of a caricature. These failures should not necessarily be blamed on the actors, but on the nature of the script and characters.
Several of the stories of these people could be made into a passable movie. One of the main problems Catch and Release has, though, is that it tries to clutter more than a dozen subplots, none of which are very strong, into a single movie.
This movie has an illegitimate child, a love triangle that never pans out, not to mention the obvious mourning of the departed. That is just a few examples of major story elements Catch and Release tries to pack in. The trouble with the amount of subplots here is that they just can't fit with any complexity. As a result, the events taking place felt forced and uninspired.
It's surprising that an event as somber as the unexpected death of a loved one could be made into such a silly affair. I felt some sympathy for the actors involved, and the movie made me wonder if they were just looking for a paycheck, or if the script seemed more plausible and interesting before the editing process.
These grievances should not be mistaken for outright abhorrence though, as there are many, many worse movies than Catch and Release. Most bad movies try to take one big step in one direction and fall flat. Catch and Release, on the other hand, tries to dance around the room and just bumps into every wall.