3555. Caught In The Act (1997)

Starring: Sarah Crowe, Annette Badland, Nadia Sawalha

Director: Mark Greenstreet

Running Time: 90 mins

Caught In The Act is a British film about a woman who, in order to impress her long-time crush, enrols herself and her two friends in a stage performance, without telling them.

A sweet enough romp around Norfolk, Caught In The Act has all the charm of a home video – but much like a home video – it’s a bit of a messy, uneventful photo album. As lovely as much of the film is, its story is far from engaging, slowly winding its way through a series of misadventures, before finally getting to where it’s going in the last fifteen minutes or so.

Those last fifteen minutes, where we see the girls get up on stage and perform after all that planning and all that chaos, are actually a lot of fun. The romantic stakes that the film sets up early on aren’t the most convincing, but, with its home video appearance, you do get a sense of the stage fright and awkwardness of performing with the most hectic preparation.

And that’s the biggest strength of Caught In The Act – it’s a down-to-earth and relatable movie that never goes overboard with ridiculous hijinks or melodramatic romance and emotion. However, this movie is in fact so down-to-earth that it feels like a rather simplistic portrayal of everyday life, hardly that different from your own.

With the exception of some lovely vistas of both Norwich and the Norfolk countryside, there’s not much about Caught In The Act to really keep you entertained for the first hour and fifteen minutes. The lead trio of Sara Crowe, Annette Badland and Nadia Sawalha are perfectly lovely throughout, but some slightly screechy misadventures mean this film struggles to really endear itself beyond the surface.

In short, there’s not all that much to write about Caught In The Act, simply because not all that much happens. It’s a perfectly harmless movie that might have a little streak of coming-of-age drama to it, but the reality is that it’s much like a home video, struggling to make itself stand out as a great story that’s aching to be told. So, that’s why I’m giving it a 5.7 overall.