Cat Run - The bad guys are more interesting than the good guys

I’ve just finished watching ‘Cat Run’ and I figured I better get my thoughts down before I totally forget what I wanted to say.  I’ll begin by mentioning that I’m quite happy to watch ‘bad’ films.  By that I mean ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ films.  I wasn’t expecting much from a film called ‘Cat Run.’ I read the blurb – working girl witnesses murder, needs protection, baddies give chase.  Yeah, that’ll do me for an hour and a half of my time.

I started watching it.  My first thought was, ‘Is this film dubbed?’ The voices didn’t seem to match up with the actors’ mouths and I wondered whether I was watching a foreign film (it is set mainly in continental Europe) dubbed into English.  But I wasn’t.  I overlooked the odd lip-syncing and continued.  Sure enough, a high class escort witness a multiple murder and comes away with a hard disk containing data the baddies are after.  Cue the chase.

The escort runs hither and thither, generally looking pretty attractive and little else.  Then we meet our other heroes.  A pair of young men who set up a detective agency help to find her.  I have to say they didn’t appeal to me.  The main character I found ‘wet’ and uninteresting and his friend might as well have been called ‘cliched best friend #298.’ I have to say by this time I was tuning out – checking my emails on my phone and stuff.  It was all pretty dull.  I may even have turned it off there and then had it not been for one thing...

Helen Bingham.  If you don’t know her (and I must confess that I don’t), she’s a British actress who must be around middle age (think Helen Mirren, only about twenty years ago).  Anyway, she’s hired as an assassin (yes, a middle age woman with cut-glass English accent is a bad-ass assassin – go with it) to bring in the escort and anyone who aids and abets her.  In short – Helen Bingham rocks.  She totally steals every scene and makes the film watchable.  The heroes pale in comparison compared to her.  She was so good that I had a horrible feeling that she was only going to be in it for a few scenes and I’d end up watching the rest of the film in the hope that she returns.  I’m glad to say she’s in it the whole way through.  And the film is all the better for it.

I won’t go into too much detail about what follows, only that if you feel like watching a sort of B-movie version of a Guy Ritchie/spy thriller chase movie (yes, it crosses genres quite broadly – there’s even a lot of black comedy thrown in there for good measure), then this one is worth it simply for Helen Bingham’s performance.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that