What if Sandra Oh and Anne Heche beat the shit out of each other? That absurdly simplistic premise unfortunately gains no additional substance throughout Onur Tukel’s Catfight. The black comedy severely lacks narrative depth regarding the exact reason for the duo’s aggression, which makes its complex alternate reality setting all the more jarring, albeit somewhat masochistically amusing given the current political climate. Needless to say, there is a disconnect between the fight scenes and the rest of the film, which is to say that the core joke is more or less baseless. Tukel’s script incorporates social and economic class in the rift between his brawlers, but what’s played for laughs doesn’t land and the rest is all too cliché.
When the two first meet, former college frenemies Veronica (Oh) and Ashley (Heche) are at a swanky party in celebration of business deals involving Veronica’s husband. Ashley is part of the catering crew, making ends meet while she pursues her art. There’s little more setup than both women taking jabs at their respective social statuses—Veronica being a trophy wife and Ashley being a struggling artist—before they come to blows in the stairwell. One sucker punch turns into throwing each other against the wall and down the stairs. At no point does either of them seem to question the fact that they are quite literally beating the living shit out of the other. Ashley even calmly walks away, leaving Veronica unconscious and in a two-year coma.
The extremity of their brawl is meant to be humorous, but with a title like Catfight and little background behind the multiple drawn-out fight scenes in the film (each accompanied by a piece from Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc. and resulting in a two-year coma for the loser), this physical comedy is merely playing to the base desire to see people beaten up and stoking the fires of female competitiveness. Their outrageous savagery is funny purely because of how overblown it is, but the simplicity of that comedy and the inherent message is wildly negative.
Padding these fight scenes is this alternate reality where the U.S. is fighting the War on Terror in the Middle East, but the new uber-conservative President reinstated the draft and lowered draft age to 17. In a situation akin to the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of young men have been sent off to war and many, including Veronica’s son, have died. Tukel likely intended this to be karmic punishment for her husband profiting off the war, and the same goes for Ashley’s aggressive art being labelled exploitative and her career subsequently spiraling. But regardless, that dark subplot and political satire clashes horribly with the innocuous fight scenes.
Tonal inconsistencies aside, Catfight comes across as a lazy effort. There’s no motivation for its protagonists’ extreme hatred of one another, making the violence patently gratuitous. And the narrative itself is merely structured around these all-out brawls, filling time in between the real set pieces. The through line of vengeance is the only thing that scarcely keeps this film going, but even then, the parallelism that Tukel uses in Veronica and Ashley’s lives makes Catfight repetitive rather than karmically cathartic.
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