Stream or skip?

Catch (Now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is an M. Night Shyamalan classic: Destined to Divide. It's either so ridiculous you'll love it or so ridiculous you'll detest it. The bottom line is that it's ridiculous – and a roller coaster ride that somewhat mirrors our experience of Shyamalan's Hitchcock-derived, twist-filled thrillers. He brought us with him The sixth senserewarded us with UnbreakableHe saw his reputation plummet with such turkeys The event And After Earthbrought us back with him The visit And Sharedisappointed us Glass And Oldand showed us a somewhat refreshingly new side of himself Knock on the hut. So are we up or down? Catch? Let's find out – and the film's contribution to the HARTNETTAISSANCE left me at “up” before I pressed play.

CATCH: STREAM OR SKIP?

The essentials: Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is a father so hard at the moment. Pop superstar Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan) is performing tonight and taking his early teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) with her to the big show. She is so overjoyed that she circles the moon completely and over it again and then flies on to Mars. There's half-hearted talk about a fight between Riley and her friends, and I think that's why her dad is her date. And boy, is he ready for it. Enthusiastic, smiling big and goofy, buying snacks, buying merchandise, encouraging them, just experiencing joy through his daughter. Many fathers would gut it, rolling their eyes, crossing their arms and wincing amid the noise of screaming teenagers. But not Cooper. Here is the father of the damn year.

As Lady Raven kills it on stage, Cooper looks around and notices an unusually large security presence. For example, squadrons of heavily armed and armored SWAT guys. Occasionally uniformed officers grab a man from the crowd. Curious. At this point I suggest you put on a five-point harness because the devices are going to make things really bumpy from now on. Cooper leaves Riley in her seat several times under the pretense of going to the bathroom or getting a t-shirt, etc. so he can snoop around and find out what's going on. He asks a merchandise seller what the deal is, and the guy spills a vat of beans so big it could feed millions: This whole Lady Raven show is a trap. The authorities know that a serial killer called “The Butcher” – notorious for cutting his victims into pieces – is attending the concert, so they're going to temporarily turn the arena into a police state and catch him. Isn't that wild? Put 20,000 unsuspecting people in danger in a massive public venue in order to arrest an incredibly dangerous person? While police with machine guns line the hallways and none of these starry Lady Raven bon vivants will question it? Damned.

Cooper's answer to this is oh wow! on the outside. Inside there is more Oh shit! Because the last thing he wants is to get caught for his heinous crimes. He manages to do some amazing things, like sneaking into employee areas to eavesdrop on the police as they strategize, causing a distraction by causing a small explosion in a fryer at a concession stand, and stealing a radio with it he can eavesdrop on the FBI profiler's (Hayley Mills) conversations, etc. He even has luck finding Lady Raven's uncle (M. Night Shyamalan), who he hopes will give him a chance to get out through a door behind the escape stage. Now getting involved in all this is a bit like trying to swallow a sperm whale whole. But are we still interested to see what happens next? Yes, I think so. Against my better judgment.

What films will it remind you of?: The psychological elements of Catch reveal that Shyamalan still owns Hitchcocks Psycho in great awe. The filmmaker also said his original pitch was “The Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift show.” But the 2024 film that really bears the ugly, blackened heart of Silence of the Lambs Is Long legswhich will likely emerge as horror champion of the year.

Performance worth seeing: Hartnett. He's absolutely hilarious in this film, fully committed to camping and embracing the profound silliness of playing a split-personality superdad who's secretly a bloodthirsty maniac.

Memorable dialogue: A tour manager shares a rather ironic remark with Cooper: “Your daughter will never forget this evening!”

Gender and skin: None.

Our opinion: Many things can be true at the same time: Catch is captivating, entertaining and somewhat exciting. It's as incredibly stupid in concept as it is excellent in its visual execution. It's shot and edited with care and precision, and sloppily written so that Shyamalan never seems to think about plausibility. This is his style now, a method he has been refining for 25 years. It is his attempt to become the heir to Hitchcock's master manipulator throne. You could easily poke a few dozen holes in this flimsy plot, half of them in the ending, which is nonsensical nonsense. Shyamalan's actions drive us crazy, and to say that he does it on purpose isn't much of a theoretical assumption. Maybe it's great and maybe it sucks, but at least it's not boring.

A thing that can divide Catch What's special about his smaller work is its playfulness. Shyamalan's grim, comic irony has always been his hallmark, but this film seems just a little self-aware, particularly in Hartnett's performance; He almost winks at the audience as Cooper works to compartmentalize his binary self (“Never let the two lives touch,” he murmurs to himself at one point) and thinks quickly on his feet, as if he were Enjoy the game of cat and mouse game where the aim is to avoid capture. Hartnett is clearly having fun, and we sense Shyamalan starting to laugh with glee as he piles up one ridiculous invention after another, imagining his audience laughing or getting angry at all the silliness.

As always, a Shyamalan film can easily be summed up as an exercise for the ego. Catch does exactly that, with the added, potentially annoying nepotism of Shyamalan, who casts his aspiring pop singer daughter as an arena-filling superstar (Saleka wrote all the songs in the film, and her father pushes her to the forefront more than occasionally). Beyond the mechanics of Shyamalan's storytelling, there's a frustrating truth about many of his films: They so often seem to be about little more than themselves and their filmmaker's desire to play the audience like, I don't know, a didgeridoo (Hitchcock wanted the audience play). “like a piano”; Shyamalan is rarely so subtle). It's a moment Catch which satirizes part of the macabre fascination with true crime – Cooper's merch stand buddy expresses a strange, almost admiration for The Butcher, saying “I followed him on all 12 victims!” as if he's been a Springsteen ever since – fan Greetings from Asbury Park. The film doesn't have much else to say, but perhaps this part follows a parallel idea that many of us have followed Shyamalan through his last 14 films, whether they're great or good or bad or terrible. Maybe we just like being provoked.

Our call: I was really teetering on the fence the whole time Catch – it was weird, it was terrible, it was tense, it elicited eye roll after eye roll. But the very funny final shot might have made it worth sitting through the whole flapdoodle. So STREAM IT I guess.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.