It’s always heartwarming when a talented artist returns to the public eye after years of relative obscurity. They can come back like a force of nature and get their career back on track, and that’s always a great success story.
For today’s example, let’s look at Josh Hartnett. Josh was a teen heartthrob in the late 1990s and 2000s. If you look at his Wikipedia, you’ll find multiple nominations for Teen Choice Awards, MTV Movie Awards, and Saturn Awards. He was everywhere.
Even as he grew older and was obviously no longer offered hot teen roles, he was cast in bigger budget productions, such as Lucky number Slevin And 30 days of night. It seemed as though his career would mature with him, and we would see much of his development and transformation on screen.
Then came the late 2000s to early 2020s and Josh Hartnett seemingly disappeared from the Hollywood scene. Oh, he was still working, but less and in smaller roles in smaller films. And as time works on all of us, we all just moved on and didn’t think about him so much anymore. As a big Halloween As a fan of the franchise, I would occasionally watch H20 and think, “Whatever happened to the boy with the hair?”
Then he was suddenly back! In the award-winning and big-budget hit series Oppenheimerno less! It was time for the Josh Hartnett renaissance, and his successor to Oppy is the thriller by M. Night Shyamalan, Catch.
Catch is the story of Cooper, a firefighter and family man who takes his daughter to a concert by the biggest pop act in the world, Lady Raven. But Cooper has a secret: he is actually the local serial killer known as “The Butcher,” and he also has another victim chained up waiting in the wings.
Shortly after the concert begins, Cooper learns that the police suspect him of wanting to attend the show. They have hired an FBI agent to recognize his behavior patterns and predict his movements. She leads a large task force that is supposed to make sure that he cannot leave the performance without being caught.
This begins a game of cat and mouse in which Cooper tries to stay one step ahead of his pursuers without arousing too much suspicion in his daughter Riley. And the film focuses on one big question: Can Cooper escape?
+ The interesting thing about the film is that Cooper is our protagonist and we don’t see him slaughtering or killing anyone. We see that he has secured a victim, but that’s about it. And we follow him as he charms and intrigues his way through the concert hall to find a way out of the show.
This creates a sense of empathy for the main character in the viewer, and before you know it, you’re internally cheering for the serial killer to avoid capture! There are moments in the film where I had to stop and think, “Who am I supposed to be cheering for in this film?” We’re stuck with Cooper for most of the running time.
In the third act, the tie subtly switches to another character when it’s time to get down to business and move on to the denouement. After building the story around Cooper and getting the audience to cheer him on as he escapes, Shyamalan changes course to remind us who we’re dealing with.
In this way, the film can be constructed very effectively and the viewer will be surprised.
+ Josh Hartnett is BACK in this film and he’s back in a good way, as he delivers a dynamic and disarming portrayal of our leading man. He’s incredibly powerful as Cooper, and that’s what builds the aforementioned connection the moviegoer will form with this terrifying killer. But Hartnett plays a devoted father and a charming con man.
When things are going well for Cooper, he is all smiles and joy. When things get too tough, however, he loses that facade and becomes wilder and more dangerous. Hartnett is in every aspect of the performance and we are all reminded why he was such a star twenty years ago.
– The film makes some strange camerawork choices, especially with regard to the two characters talking to each other at the same time.
You’ve probably seen the scene in the trailer where Cooper talks to the t-shirt seller in the concert hall and the seller reveals that the show is an FBI trap. It’s a great moment in the trailer!
The problem, however, is that in the actual scene, the two characters are shown through heavily zoomed-in close-ups of their faces. Combine that with some of Shyamalan’s clunky dialogue, and you really get the feeling that the two people who are supposed to be facing each other and having a discussion aren’t anywhere near each other. It feels like what it probably was: two individual actors reciting their lines while the other is nowhere to be seen.
I just thought it was a really weird, awkward scene and it took me out of the movie.
– There’s this weird sub-theme of Cooper having issues with his mother that the script probably thought was more important than the movie itself. It doesn’t really get fleshed out until the third act, but even then it feels like this weird aspect of Cooper’s character rather than something that’s really important to the plot. They really could’ve just done away with the whole aspect, and I’m not sure it would change much.
