When people heard Jennifer
Garner was mourning the death of her fiancée, cheers broke
out and resounding
calls of Halleluiah filled movie theaters everywhere, but
it’s all a false
alarm. It’s
just a movie, and Ben
Affleck is still alive.
Garner stars as Gray –
a Boulder,
CO
lady mourning the sudden death of her fiancée, just days
before the wedding. Now,
as she serves as the executrix of his
estate, tries to get her life back on track, and moves in with his
friends –
Sam (Kevin Smith), Dennis (Sam Jaeger) and Fritz (Timothy
“The guy who looks
like a manlier version Ryan Seacrest” Olyphant) - Gray has
come across some
strange bank accounts and payments, while also growing closer to Fritz
than she
ever imagined.
Where was the money going? Is it true love between
Fritz and Gray? How
come Gray doesn’t have any female
friends?
The problems with Catch and
Release can be summed up in two scenes.
In
one, Gray doesn’t want to give back her engagement ring to
her dead fiancée’s
family, even though it is a family heirloom, because she
doesn’t want to forget
the love of her life (how sweet and moving).
In another scene, just a few
weeks after Gray’s passionate, women-across-the-world-unite
plea to hold onto
the ring as a symbol of the love she never wants to forget, her dead
fiancée’s best
friend Fritz (a man she absolutely hated at the funeral as he snuck
away to
have a quickie, and lit up a doobie afterwards), is sliding her panties
off as
they get ready to do the horizontal mambo (not so sweet, was she still
wearing
the ring?). It all
makes me hope that if
I ever get engaged, then die a horrible death, my fiancée
will want to wait a
bit longer than a month before she does the dirty deed with another guy.
Catch and
Release suffers
from trying to be too many things to too many audiences and tastes. The tone of the movie is
all over the place,
and subplots seem strained as writer/director Susannah Grant attempts
to make
the movie into a comedy, and a drama about loss and mourning, and a
buddy movie,
and a love story and a bit of a mystery.
Too much!
These competing scenes and
tones destroy any chance Catch and
Release has to become a coherent
movie
(which leads to situations like the one I explained above). I know Grant wants to show
us how diverse and
complex all of the characters and feelings can be in this situation,
but the extreme
contrasts in this movie hurt any chance for the audience to connect
with the
characters. Even within scenes, Grant has the actors leaping from
sadness to a
quick joke and back to sadness, which jerks them around as much as it
jerks the
audience.
Smith is fine as he attempts
to make Sam into Vince Vaughn (funny Vince Vaughn from The Wedding
Crashers,
not angry Vince Vaughn from The Break Up), but his serious scenes
always come out
of nowhere, often stopping a funny moment in its tracks, then Grant
tries to
use some comic relief to get his character back on track, but the
moment is
destroyed.
Garner makes the most of her
character’s mournful moments, but truly needs more space to
work in. She’s
stuck pouting through most of the
movie, instead of winning us over slowly, but surely.
Then, suddenly, Gray emotionally is ready to
jump into the sack with another guy, who is not exactly a good catch
(she
should probably throw him back in the ocean).
Garner has enough charm to win us over at times, and
make us feel bad
for her situation as it develops, but needs more time to show the
character
growing and regaining her strength.
Olyphant gets by as Fritz,
but isn’t given enough material or screen time to develop his
character past
the obvious bad boy with a golden heart cliché.
However, it’s Jaeger who plays a
waste-of-time character with a couple
silly subplots that might make for interesting movies on their own, but
just
get in the way during Catch and
Release.
Maybe Grant purposely put those in as bathroom break
moments.
Catch and
Release seems to
be three or four different movies in one, but the whole does not equal
the sum
of all parts.
1 Waffle
(Out
Of 4)
Catch
and Release is
rated PG-13 for some sexual content, language,
some drug use.
Copyright
2007 - WaffleMovies.com
