Catch the Fair One Review: A Taken Riff with a Side of Kitchen-Sink Realism

Writer-director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Catch the Fair One is a stripped-down riff on the venerable Taken formula, with Liam Neeson’s white, upper-class ex-C.I.A. dad swapped out for a character at the opposite end of the privilege spectrum.

Kaylee (W.B.A. champ Kali Reis) is a half-Native American, half-Cape Verdean boxer struggling with drug addiction who lives in a boarding house and waits tables at a dingy diner to make ends meet. Her younger sister, Weeta (Mainaku Borrero), has been missing for two years—and is one of many Native women whose disappearance has been met with little more than a shrug by the authorities. When Kaylee obtains a lead suggesting that Weeta may be in the clutches of a local sex trafficking ring, she sets about infiltrating the organization to find her.

Catch the Fair One makes room for an engaging sense of nuance in its depiction of a would-be savior protagonist. No ruthlessly efficient killer, Kaylee is instead a haunted, desperate woman yearning to break free of her own sense of guilt at allowing her baby sister to walk home alone on the night that she was taken. Kaylee draws on her fight training to kick a bunch of misogynist ass, but the film still allows her to make mistakes and show weakness. In Catch the Fair One’s most affecting moments, Wladyka homes in on the complex mixture of rage, fear, and anguish that burbles beneath Kaylee’s usually calm, centered exterior.

But as the film progresses and Kaylee works her way through one white male baddie after another, the way that each one is underplayed with nearly the same tone of world-weary quiet menace start to feel like a tell: that Wladyka’s socially conscious tweaks to this most morally retrograde of thriller-movie templates are largely superficial. At least Kevin Dunn, as the trafficking ring’s kingpin Father Willie, gets off one indelibly disturbing line read in his response to Kaylee’s inquiry about Weeta’s whereabouts: “You think I remember their names?”

Whatever pulpy thrills that Catch the Fair One might otherwise have achieved are suffocated beneath the weight of Wladyka’s grim, self-serious direction. Bathed in steely blues and deep chiaroscuro shadows, the film seems to be constantly insisting on its own weighty importance even as its plot increasingly gives itself over to formula, eventually devolving into a series of protracted confrontations which inevitably explode into violence. Gruesomely implausible sequences, like the one in which Kaylee waterboards a pimp (Daniel Henshall) for information, are treated with a somber humorlessness that belies their inherent sensationalism.

As with Taken and its litany of copycats, Catch the Fair One is marked by a sadistic streak. Wladyka’s grim depiction of cold-blooded pimps and drug-addled sex slaves ultimately feels like little more than setup for all the maiming, torture, and death that forms the bulk of the film’s back half. Wladyka plays on our innate disgust with these sex-trafficking ghouls profiting off of human misery only to make its own pageant of brutality ring with an air of moral righteousness. If one might forgive a bit of hypocrisy in the service of a rip-snorting action spectacle, the solemnity of the film is at odds with the gratuitousness of its violence.