The titular character of Cat Run is Cat (Paz Vega), a single, working mom and high-class prostitute who, you guessed it, is on the run. What happened was, Cat was working a rich-person party in Eastern Europe when one of the guests, a Very Important Person named Krebb (Christopher McDonald) who turns out to be the US Secretary of Defense, decided to choke to death one of the two women he’s having sex with. Then all of Cat’s naked coworkers are rounded up and shot, mostly in the head. I think it’s to ensure that there aren’t any witnesses, although none of the male guests are executed. How sloppy. But at least you can tell a lot of thought and effort went into killing naked women on the filmmakers’ part: when a bullet pierces one of the women’s eye, the puncture and the eruption of blood is meticulous, the film elegantly slowed, the camera panning gently.
After Cat narrowly escapes with her life, the next day she stumbles upon a pair of American guys hanging out in a restaurant. We learn that their names are Anthony (Scott Mechlowitz) and Julian (Alphonso McAuley) through the freeze-frame onscreen text that pops up every single fucking time a character is introduced, giving us tongue-in-cheek factoids and real names and codenames — a strategy that in part fits perfectly with the film’s edgy-as-a-fauxhawk-in-2015 aesthetic, and in part is probably just to make up for a lack of even the most basic expository skill. Anthony, according to the movie’s version of a pop-up ad, has an IQ of 145; he’s also a would-be chef and restaurateur. Julian, codename “The Extrovert,” is his BFF from the states, recently arrived. They’re as familiar as sitcom characters. So’s their acting.
Cat’s trauma must have worn off quickly, because with the power of her ass and cleavage — which the two guys ogle and then look at each other to make sure that the other one is ogling, too, in order to share a male bonding experience — she distracts the guys enough to steal their car and cell phone. Then, they start a private detective agency and try to find her, because she’s hot and Anthony, you can tell, is already in the movie version of love with her. Their office is a space with rotting floorboards and windows that look out over a porno theater. Their assistant is a one-armed, no-legged man named Dexter (D.L. Hughley), who has lived through various tragedies (war veteran, shark ate his wife). Sometime in their search, they discover a guy who has had his fingers and nose chopped off with a cigar clip; his severed testicles are in an ash tray next to him. Also, more prostitutes are killed, with an overdose of morphine and a dentist’s drill just for the torture of it.
Cat Run is director John Stockwell (best known for being that dude on Top Gun) and writers Nick Ball and John Niven’s attempt at a comedy. But the moments of violence are more memorable than any of the film’s jokes, which consist of stuff like Anthony and Julian’s incessant bro-bonding witticisms and watching the one-limbed guy enter into a sword fight only to get that limb cut off. Also, at the end of the film, Julian distracts some armed men and saves everyone’s lives by pulling up his kilt and swinging his penis back and forth. It reaches to his knees because, did I mention, he’s black. Don’t feel threatened, though — the movie takes great pains to feminize him, while constantly reminding us he’s a buffoon.
The only dispersant to Cat Run’s comedic oil and violent water is Helen Bingham (Janet McTeer), a prim and proper English lady who carries a porcelain teacup and saucer in her suitcase and is also an assassin hired to kill Cat. Her codename is Virginia Woolf and/or Emily Bronte, and she’s also the one who cut off those testicles I mentioned previously, because their owner had information she wanted and because he was a pornographer and Cat’s pimp. Ms. Bingham just hates smut peddlers, she says. This, I think, is supposed to absolve the film of its prostitute-killing spree in the first scene, or at least give some Zen to its war between the sexes. Or maybe not, since feminist icon Ms. Woolf is also the one who used dental equipment to torture that prostitute I mentioned. Still, she tells everyone, as if proving her humanity, Cat’s baby is safe because she’d never kill an infant. Well, thank goodness!
For a film about sex workers that’s full of naked women and one guy’s prosthetic penis, Cat Run sure is puritanical. Although, for a brief moment I thought it wasn’t. One of Cat’s former clients tells the two would-be detectives that she “produced for him” a stream of ejaculate that shot 11 feet, likening it to a salty exhalation from Moby Dick, and showed them the location on his wall that’s “the mark she leaves,” circled in marker and labeled “plaisir de Cat.” I was delighted: Cat squirted 11 feet! But a few moments later, I realized he was talking about his own jizz, teased out by Cat’s purportedly exquisite oral skills. Yeah, like a woman would really be allowed an orgasm of her own in this film. The reason the man showed them his semen spot in the first place was because Anthony (who she later marries, mind you) referred to Cat as a “blowjob provider,” and the client, who said that’s like calling Caravaggio merely a “house painter,” wanted to correct him.
At least that allusion to good head gave me a metaphor: Cat Run is as simultaneously glossy and sloppy as deep throat mucus. In this case, at least, that’s too bad: the film’s narrative ineptitude could have been a blast, but Stockwell uses just enough technical gloss — good editing, pretty shots of Europe, believable flesh wounds and explosions — to rob the film of any pleasure we could have taken in its badness. Kind of like how its perspective on women — Cat’s story immediately takes a back seat to the bumbling detective bros — robs us of enjoying either its gratuitous violence or nudity.
To be fair, the film improves once Anthony and Julian join up with Cat — who, despite her difficulty with English (Paz is Spanish) has better comedic timing than either of the guys — and the film’s multiple personalities seem to meld into something still architecturally unstable and distasteful but not unpleasurable to watch. Like Jell-O salad.
But the most entertaining moments are wholly accidental: As Cat crosses the border from Montenegro to Croatia, the blue EU flag is prominently displayed at the crossing facility, even though neither country is currently a European Union member. Anthony and Julian at one point catch an express train from Montenegro to Andorra, a miniscule country of 80,000 inhabitants straddling the French-Spanish border. I’ve been there: Andorra doesn’t have a train station. Of course, the filmmakers seem unclear as to whether it’s even a country: Cat’s pop-up ad tells us that it’s her homeland, but at one point the text onscreen calls it the “Province of Andorra.” A large part of the film’s action, too, takes place in a large apartment building in a bustling place called Dondelange in Luxembourg — it’s where Cat’s Eastern European pimp was based. In real life, population 143.
For the enjoyment those moments gave me, I’m grateful that the people who made Cat Run were too busy making sure it looked cool when a prostitute got a bullet in her eye to be bothered spending five minutes on Wikipedia.