‘Catch the Fair One’: Film Review

The elements of an electrifying thriller are all there: a treacherous premise, a captivating lead worth rooting for, a network of cold, sly villains and brilliant fight scenes.

But Catch the Fair One, a well-intentioned tale of an Indigenous boxer looking for her missing sister, struggles to effectively balance these components. Where there should be intimacy, we get distance. Where one might expect steady meditation, the narrative jitters impulsively. And so Josef Kubota Wladyka’s second feature (his first, Dirty Hands, was nominated for a 2014 Independent Spirit Award) swerves and careens in unlikely and not always clear directions, leaving this critic wanting more.

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Wladyka opens Catch the Fair One with an arresting sequence of Kaylee “K.O.” Uppashaw (played remarkably by professional boxer Kali Reis) getting ready for a championship fight. Her friend and coach Brick (professional boxer Shelito Vincent) bandages her wrist with surgical precision. The spare, almost poetic dialogue (“open”, “turn”, “close”, “grip it”, “too tight”?), the sudden cuts to Kaylee’s steely gaze, to the boxer pounding mitts with Brick and then to her waking up in a woman’s shelter gesture at Wladyka’s confidence and ability to efficiently build out a portrait of his protagonist, her life and background.

After sex traffickers kidnapped Kaylee’s younger sister Weeta (Mainaku Borrero), the boxer quit fighting and started using. Although Kaylee’s clean now, she’s sustained damage from those dark years: She doesn’t speak to her mother, played by Kimberly Guerrero (a weary woman who runs a support group for other people with missing loved ones); she lives in a shelter, where she sleeps with a razor blade tucked inside her mouth; and she siphons leftovers from the diner where she’s employed as a waitress. DP Ross Giardina’s intimate gaze coupled with the cold palette — think undertones of blue and iron gray — only adds to our sense of Kaylee’s bitter situation.

But the reserved boxer is not hopeless, and Wladyka, who co-wrote the film’s story with Reis, doesn’t cast his protagonist as pitiful. This is a story about strength and resolve. It’s also about the distressingly underreported crisis of missing Indigenous girls and women in the United States. A recent study from two Indigenous-led groups documented over 2,000 missing girls and women, roughly 1,800 of whom were murdered in the last 40 years. Catch the Fair One opts for subtlety over explication, successfully weaving the weight and urgency of this crisis into the film’s atmosphere. For that, Wladyka and Reis deserve much praise.

In the years since Weeta disappeared, Kaylee has been gathering intel on the sex-trafficking operation in the area (the film was shot on Seneca land in Buffalo, N.Y., but the setting isn’t clear) and searching for her sister. It’s when Catch the Fair One chronicles Kaylee’s journey, framing it, understandably, as the most important battle of her life, that the narrative begins to wobble. The film adopts the tenor of the Taken series, with Kaylee’s grim determination matching Liam Neeson’s. While the chilling approach is appropriate for observing the grimy operation, it alienates us from Kaylee, undoing much of the first act’s good work.

Kaylee’s plan doesn’t go as expected after the villains realize what she’s up to. With her cover blown, the boxer grows more resolute in her search and tries to find the kingpin. Action-backed fight scenes replace the earlier, more considered storytelling beats. Reis moves with the exactitude of a ballet dancer: Her swift punches are followed by elegant dodges; the grunts and groans adopt a strange musicality.

But these enthralling scenes aren’t enough to make up for what begins to feel like a too-thin narrative. “Nobody is looking because nobody cares,” one character callously tells Kaylee. Such clichés are deployed with regularity as our boxer must escape increasingly perilous situations. A cutaway to the life of henchman Bobby (Daniel Henshall) is an inefficient use of time. Wouldn’t it have been far more interesting to stay with Kaylee, to add flashbacks of her life with Weeta, to give viewers a better understanding of that relationship?

By the time Kaylee’s odyssey ends, we’re left with abandoned threads of many good stories instead of one that satisfyingly coheres. There’s a creeping sense, too, that in trying to pursue the violence and suspense of the thriller genre, Catch the Fair One jettisons a deeper exploration of Kaylee’s grief-driven motive. The way mourning contorts her perceptions and inspires contradictory approaches to saving her sister is occasionally gestured at, but the film shrinks from teasing out the complexities of her heroism. She’s committed to finding Weeta, but at what cost? This is the question worth answering.