As I was watching John Rocha and Jeff Sneider on their podcast The Hot Mike, they were talking about some of their favorite movies from 2022, and Sneider mentioned one that he thought was fantastic. It was entitled Catch the Fair One and he said it was available on VOD. Intrigued by the recommendation, I went to Vudu and, sure enough, the film was there and I thought this would be a great film to watch when travel is discouraged on a snowy Friday morning in Eastern Iowa.

Jeff Sneider was right. It was quite the movie, full of tension and intensity.

Kaylee (Kali Reis) was once a championship level boxer whose life had taken a downward turn since her sister was missing. The loss and grief set her on an obsessive path to try and find her sister. The path led her to a sex trafficking ring and a violent journey of vengeance.

Kali Reis gets to take her character on quite the character arc, though she probably does not learn much during the film. She went from a hugely successful boxer to someone who sees what the life of revenge can do to you. There are several scenes that, while you understand why Kaylee is doing what she is doing, it is very difficult to root for her while she is doing it.

Catch the Fair One does an admirable job of creating a sense of anxiety among the viewers while Kaylee continued to make poor choices on her road of vengeance. You could feel that the road she was on was leading to something terrible and yet you could see that Kaylee did not seem to care about what was going to happen.

Yet, you could tell that she still had some of her humanity with the way she conducted herself at times, and you know that she had good motivations, even if her intentions were not positive.

This film provided a real-life feel to a movie subgenre that, many times over, becomes unrealistic or even cartoonish. There is nothing cartoonish about Catch the Fair One. It is brutally real and tough to watch at times.

3.6 stars