Writer & director Aaron Harvey's shoot'em up "Catch .44" qualifies as an above-average opus hampered by too much talk but boasting an ample body count. Essentially, this tightly-knit crime thriller about a circle of shady characters in the middle of nowhere in Louisiana shares a lot in common with Quentin Tarantino's loquacious crime dramas. The females are empowered, the language is smutty, and the blood flows like wine. The trouble is that not all of the dialogue is as cool as half of it is. The joke about the Catholic nuns is about as witty as this dark tale gets. The story follows three women with guns who are working for a guy named Mel (Bruce Willis of "Die Hard") and they are supposed to intercept a shipment of illegal narcotics going through Mel's territory. An African-American gun-for-hire (Forest Whitaker of "Bird") has been Mel's close friend for seven years and he has the girls' back. The women arrive at a rendezvous which turns out to be a greasy spoon off the highway and find themselves deep knee of blood and corpses. Harvey relates his bloodthirsty yarn in flashback so you know who is going to survive before the tale is told. Nevertheless, good performances, some interesting dialogue, and some violence boost this yarn about what it would have been.
