‘Catch the Honest One’ Overview: The Combat of Her Life

“Catch the Honest One” is a violent, brooding rescue-revenge drama — the sort of style exercise you may look forward to finding Liam Neeson grimacing his manner although round this time of 12 months. With all respect to Neeson, the star of this robust, modest film brings a special sort of credibility. She’s Kali Reis, a world champion boxer in each the welterweight and middleweight courses. Her nickname is Okay.O.

Reis, who conceived the story with the author and director Josef Kubota Wladyka, performs Kaylee Uppashaw, a boxer whose finest preventing days could also be behind her. Kaylee waits tables in a diner, spends nights at a shelter (sleeping with a razor blade tucked into her cheek) and anguishes over the destiny of her youthful sister, Weeta (Mainaku Borrero), who has been kidnapped by intercourse traffickers. Grief, guilt and fury mix to ship Kaylee on the lookout for Jaya, and for payback.

Kaylee describes herself as half Native American, half Cape Verdean — an identification she shares with Reis — and a robust present of satisfaction and social consciousness runs by the movie. Weeta and Kaylee’s mom, Jaya (Kimberly Guerrero), leads a assist group for the households of lacking Native ladies and women, whose photos cowl the partitions exterior the assembly room. The trafficking ring is led by a father-son pair of rich white males who cover their viciousness behind a facade of respectability.

The nexus of racism, patriarchal energy and sexual exploitation provides “Catch the Honest One” a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to point out worry in addition to resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist. The boxer Shelito Vincent, as Kaylee’s coach, offers a sparkle of salty wit amid the overwhelming grimness. Capturing in northwestern New York, principally at evening, Wladyka doesn’t discover loads of heat.

As Kaylee probes deeper into this coronary heart of darkness, the plot flattens out right into a sequence of blunt, brutal scenes of reckoning. These aren’t badly executed, however because the bloodshed escalates, among the movie’s ambition begins to leak away. It’s a honest, reasonably efficient revenge drama which may have been one thing extra.

Catch the Honest One
Not rated. Working time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and out there to lease or purchase on Google Play, Vudu and different streaming platforms and pay TV operators.