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CATWOMAN * out of *****
 Genres
2004
Directed by Pitof Written by Bob Kane (characters) Theresa Rebeck and John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris (story) John D. Brancato & Michael Ferris and John Rogers (screenplay) Cast Halle Berry .... Patience Phillips/Catwoman Benjamin Bratt .... Tom Lone Sharon Stone .... Laurel Hedare Lambert Wilson .... George Hedare Frances Conroy .... Ophelia Alex Borstein .... Sally Michael Massee .... Armando Byron Mann .... Wesley Kim Smith .... Drina Christopher Heyerdahl .... Rocker Peter Wingfield .... Dr. Ivan Slavicky Berend McKenzie .... Lance
Ah, Catwoman. Lee Meriwether, Julie Newmar, Michelle Pfeiffer. That lovable leather-clad thief. That cheeky minx who loved to torment the ever erectily-dysfunctioned Batman. At long last a movie to call her own. But, um. Halle Berry? Well, she may be attractive, but no one would ever use the phrase "smouldering sex kitten" to describe her. Oh, and there’s a French director named Pitof. The French sure have a fine tradition of making superhero films.
 | Stone whispers in Berry's ear, sweet
nothings of large paydays. | The story is about shy marketing campaign designer Patience Phillips (Berry). She works for a company about to launch a product called Beauline, which keeps skin young but turns it to marble. Worst of all, if you stop using it your skin melts. No matter, the company (personified in Sharon Stone and Lambert Wilson) are going to start selling it anyway. But when poor Patience finds out about the nasty side effects she’s knocked off. But what our dastardly villains didn’t count on (how could they really) was Patience being bought back to life by an Egyptian cat’s breath and given superpowers. Our hero is then able to throw of her personal shackles, fight the oppression of the beauty industry, and in general be all empowered and junk.
Catwoman goes straight for the female market (there was a big ad campaign in mags like Cosmo), which makes it amusing to watch as a guy, and possibly insulting to watch as a female. I’m not quite sure if the film fails because of this or because it does it all so badly, but I suspect a combination. Patience is given the standard sidekicks/workmates of every romantic comedy. There’s the "funny" (here completely unfunny) fat one, who is a bit crude, a bit loose, but literally tons of fun. And of course, the campy gay one who seems to have been edited into the movie late in the game. And let’s not forget the endless number of songs that sound almost identical to Survivor by Destiny’s Child that pop up to keep us motivated to be independent women.
 | Terrified of Berry's unnatural
Fabulashes, the cat prepares for
attack. | The film is a bit of a muddled mess. The huge number of credited writers (ignoring Bob Kane, of course) doesn’t help (I’m sure they can all do better work than this if you left them to their own devices). In all of the mishmash the fact that this seems like it’s meant to be about a newly empowered woman fighting the beauty industry isn’t really handled that well. If they followed this to its conclusion Catwoman shouldn’t be wearing lipstick and should be letting hair sprout between the cracks in her leather. But unrealistic snideness aside, Catwoman just doesn’t seem that motivated by anything except running around and making bad cat-related puns.
There are some amazingly bad scenes in this film. One involves a "sexy" one-on-one basketball match/dry hump between Patience and Tom. This involves about a thousand quick cuts, lots of suggestive winks, bad dribbling, and (strangest of all) cheering kids who are absolutely loving it (despite neither of them taking a shot until Patience dunks it). And then there’s the dance club scene, where Patience sort of dances around and whips people. It’s hard to tell what she’s trying to do, but damn if she isn’t doing it in a sassy, empowered way.
Then there’s the sad sight of Halle Berry and Sharon Stone having a rumble. I’m not the hugest Sharon Stone fan, but going from being punched out by Arnie in Total Recall to getting scratched by Halle Berry in Catwoman is a long way to fall. And the fact (from IMDb) that it took nine days to film it all is just depressing. An Oscar winner and an Oscar nominee standing round in hideous tight clothing as some guy named Pitof devises new ways to humiliate them. The thought is almost too much to bear.
 | | Stoopid. | What exactly is a Pitof though? And should one be directing a movie? The answer to the second question is obviously no. The first is a little harder to pin down. Turns out he’s a special effects wizard. And while he’s the director here (and not a good one), this does turn me to a discussion of the special effects. The main problem with them is that they’re not quite good enough. Their about 98% of the way there, but that missing 2% is fatal. There are CGI house cats that look just a bit less cartoony than Garfield, and Catwoman’s catlike jumping just looks unrealistic. Not unrealistic in the sense that I wasn’t buying into her cat powers, unrealistic in that the speed and weight and movement didn’t look quite right.
Does this film signal the end of the great Halle Berry experiment of 2000-2005? I hope so, not that I want her career to end (though I wouldn’t mind an end to those Fabulash commercials), it’s just time to slot her into rom coms and thrillers based on James Patterson novels, where she can safely be ignored and not ruin any potentially cool movies. Probably not going to happen though. I see she’s been announced in the role of Foxy Brown in the remake of the same name (originally played by Pam Grier). Now that is role she can not play, and a film I’d want to see if not for her.
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