Before you really even knew who the hell these three were, there was a little movie called Catch That Kid which featured young actors in main roles. Now, of the three of them, you’ll easily recognize Kristen Stewart and Corbin Bleu and some (like myself) will recognize Max Thieriot before their breakout roles in Twilight, High School Musical, and a slew of films for Max Thieriot. Catch That Kid is an entertaining movie that may not have impressed critics or filmgoers at the time it was released but then this movie was intended for the typical moviegoer. It was about preteens, who would invariably rather sneak into an R-Rated flick. It also doesn’t help that it was released during the dump months for movies (January through April, October unless you’re a horror movie, and September if you’re not good enough for the Summer or Winter), specifically it was released in February of 2004. But what it lacks in planning it makes up for in execution.
Maddy (Kristen Stewart) is the daughter of Tom (Sam Robards) who climbed Mount Everest and his success has imbued a love of climbing in his young daughter. However, Tom fell a rather large distance during one of his climbs, and the fear of something happening to Maddy has prompted Tom and Molly (Jennifer Beals) to demand that Maddy never climb again in order to protect her. This being a young adolescent, of course, entirely disregards her parent’s more than reasonable request.
Her two best friends are Gus (Thieriot) and Austin (Bleu) and both of them have major crushes on Maddy as they come into that time of their lives were love triangles are entirely appropriate, possible, and unfortunately expected in a movie that could spend its time on… anything else. The three of them are avid go-carters and enjoy spending time with one another to the point that Maddy (as a step away from the norm) is well aware of their feelings towards her.
That fall that I mentioned earlier comes back to haunt Tom as it caused internal injuries that doctors were either too incompetent to find or he simply didn’t go to a hospital after falling nine stories, and will be left paralyzed from the neck down if he doesn’t get an experimental procedure costing around $250,000. Here in comes the plot, of which either adults are stupid, bank security is not up to code, or something that could scarily happen in real life.
Maddy decides to rob the bank her mother works in so that she can come up with the money to save her father, her hero. It just so happens her mother has built a security system for the bank that she works for. Just so you know, Maddy’s mother did very much attempt to get a loan from the very bank she works at, only to be coldly dismissed by her boss Donald Brisbane (Michael Des Barres).
Maddy is able to convince Austin and Gus into helping her and they, rather ingeniously, plan a heist that would make the IMF (Mission Impossible) proud. Like I said, this movie is entertaining and you might just need a bit of this in your life right now. Also, it is absolutely awesome to see some of these actors in roles long before they made it into something that would explode their careers.
Lloydd Marshall Books 