As the movie starts we are right in the middle of a wake that was supposed to be a wedding. At the center of the activity is Gray (Jennifer Garner), surrounded by friends as she struggles to cope with the untimely loss of her fiancee, Grady. As her coping mechanisms kick in, she moves in with Grady's roomies Sam and Dennis (Kevin Smith and Sam Jaeger). Also in the mix is Grady's friend Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), in town for the funeral, and hangs around to help clean up.
Catch and Release is a nightmare narrative. The characters are thin and do not seem to work with any type of brain function. Rather than being creations moving within the plot, they are manipulated by the plot into a fashion that resembles a bad soap opera. Rather than dealing with the real emotions we fall into melodrama, a melodrama populated with characters that I don't care much about.
As I sat in the theater, I found myself thinking about how long the movie felt. I glanced at my watch and found it had only been 45 minutes. Around the hour mark I was wondering how they were going to stretch the story, not to mention the believability to the 110 minute runtime that I have seen posted, it felt like is going to struggle for 90. Then there are the false endings. There were a couple here, and when the real ending arrived, it had much less impact than the earlier ones would have.
If you ignore the story, the tangled mess that it is, and you ignore a couple of the characters, and you set the plot acrobatics aside, what you are left with are a few moments that are sweet or funny and would have been better off in some other film. Kevin Smith in the most substantial acting role I have ever seen him in, is solid as the comic relief roommate, and considerably more restrained than I expected. he had a number of funny and sweet moments. Then there is Jennifer Garner who can pull of the tough girl/emotional wreck character with the best of them, but here she just has the emotional wreck to work with. Such as it is, she has some very touching moments and a scene with Timothy Olyphant where the sparks flew. Sadly they were extinguished as fast as they appeared.
Bottomline. I would have to recommend skipping this and waiting for it to hit DVD. It was a script that was removed from the oven to soon. It came out solid on the edges, but the inside is a raw inedible mess.
Not Recommended.
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