DVD Reviews: Catch .44 | Chronicle
Catch .44
Anchor Bay, £15.99
HAD Catch .44 been released sometime around 1995 or 1996, it would probably have gone straight to video and been dismissed as another try-hard Tarantino knock-off to rank alongside the likes of 2 Days in the Valley and Love and a .45.
With its fractured chronology, slangy dialogue and retro soundtrack, this tale of double-dealing, backstabbing criminals piecing together a job-gone-violently wrong is a blatant attempt to make a mid-1990s Tarantino-style movie.
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Hide AdIt even stars frequent Tarantino collaborator Bruce Willis – slumming it yet again – as a big-shot crime boss whose erroneous decision to set up three tough-talking women (Malin Akerman, Nikki Reed and Deborah Ann Woll) to take the fall for a drug deal results in a bloody revenge mission.Mexican standoffs, multi-stranded plotting, and oodles of stylised violence follow, as do self-aware pop culture gags, the most annoying of which involves the girls rhapsodising about the brilliance of Bruce Willis’s debut album, The Return of Bruno. Please Bruce, respect yourself.
Chronicle
Twentieth Century Fox, £19.99
Another overused film trend is given a surprisingly fresh spin in Chronicle, a superhero movie that puts the now ubiquitous found-footage device to good use. That’s largely thanks to writer Max “son of John” Landis and director Josh Trank capitalising on the initial irritation factor that comes from watching characters incessantly recording every aspect of their lives and feeding it into a plot that turns out not to be a superhero origins story so much as a supervillain origins story.
That supervillain-in-waiting is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), an antisocial student from a broken home whose alienation is intensified by his determination to constantly view life through a lens. When accidental exposure to something weird leaves him, his good-looking cousin (Alex Russell) and his cousin’s best friend (Michael B Jordan) with telekinetic powers, he finally feels part of something special, but when his belief in his developing abilities combines with hubris and resentment, his life starts spinning out of control with dangerous consequences.It’s nifty enough concept, well executed, not least because the filmmakers have figured out a plot-based way to avoiding having to use nauseating shaky-cam effects.
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