On paper, CATCH ME DADDY sounds by all accounts to be a tense and exciting cross between the art-house and thriller genres, delivering something ruthless and gritty we haven't seen before. A bit like '71, the Northern Irish film. Sadly, on screen it turns out to be a complete waste of time, a movie that dashed my expectations about ten minutes in.
A lot of these modern British 'kitchen sink' movies have similar problems in a lack of decent sympathetic characters. Certainly the two leads here - the Pakistani girl and her boyfriend who spend their lives hiding out on a caravan on a Yorkshire moor - are almost entirely without merit. They're uncouth, rude, self-centred, and spend the entire running time of the movie having stuff done to them rather than being proactive. I disliked them both instantly, and those feelings didn't change throughout the movie.
The plodding, padded scripting doesn't help. The storyline is very simplistic, with lots of travelling around punctuated by bursts of sudden violence. Things are so slow that a ten minute interval is used to show the characters dancing to some rubbishy music, which I could have done without. Yes, the cinematography is dark and brooding and occasionally atmospheric, but for what? The ending is as predictable as they come and the overacting from the lead actress is off-putting. I hated this one from beginning to end.
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