Catwoman Review

"Catwoman" reviews

Movie

Catwoman

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2007-03-28 21:56:43

Rating

0.5/5

Provider

CinemaSource

Review

''Holy Hairball, Batman! They sure choked on this Catwoman movie!''

Story

Completely stripping Catwoman of her ''Batman'' connections, the geniuses behind this comic-book movie--at least as bad as Spider-Man 2 is good--also stripped it of any pleasure. Neither campy a la Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt of the old TV series nor sexy vamp like Michelle Pfeiffer of Batman Returns, Halle Berry's Catwoman is, well, one lost little kitty in the big city. Actually, she's Patience Philips--an annoyingly mousy graphics designer for a top cosmetics firm who, despite her job, has no fashion sensibility, no self-confidence and no boyfriend. (Yeah, riiiight!) She is befriended by a mystical Egyptian Mau cat which--courtesy of lousy digital effects--often looks disturbingly like Toonces and sounds like Linda Blair in The Exorcist when it meows; moreover, its way of befriending Patience is to lure her into a suicide attempt--one of many plot points lacking a rationale. When Patience discovers that the cosmetics firm's villainous owner (Lambert Wilson) and aging supermodel wife (Sharon Stone) are marketing a toxic, disfiguring facial cream, she is killed--flushed through a drainage system into the ocean. But here comes that darn cat, again, to revive her as she's lying in sludge and mud. Next thing she knows, she's sleeping on her apartment's bookshelf, eating tuna by the caseload, looking longingly at Jaguar hood ornaments as if they're long-lost relatives, and jumping about walls, basketball courts and whatnot faster than a speeding bullet. She also takes to wearing a pointy-eared black-leather dominatrix outfit along with too much makeup but at least no whiskers. She also starts sniffing around that foul cosmetics firm, which leads to a martial-arts showdown with Stone. What the Oscar-winning Berry doesn't do, regrettably, is get a CAT scan to see what kind of ailment convinced her to make this lamebrain movie.

Acting

I've seen better acting on 7-Eleven surveillance videos than in Catwoman. Berry is cloying in the film's early stages, when she's playing insecure, lonely Patience and she's more pathetically childlike than anything else. Once she's Catwoman, though, she's really terrible, tilting her head for endless close-ups and giving lots of wide-eyed stares meant to conjure feline curiosity but that more recall George W. Bush's ''deer-in-the-headlights'' gaze. The screenplay makes a few lame attempts to observe the duality of women in the way Patience changes to Catwoman, but it's not there in the performance. Yet Berry's turn is a career-peak gem compared to Stone, who can't decide whether to play the power-mad Laurel Hedare as a broad, cartoonish send-up or as someone connected to reality. Looking like a vampiric Susan Powter and barking sarcastic lines without a hint of emotional connection to her character, Stone is just awful. On the plot's fringes, Benjamin Bratt does his best as a police officer (gee, what else) who is both infatuated with Berry and suspects her of murder.

Direction

The one-named French director Pitof (short for ''pitoful''?) supposedly is a digital-imaging expert who has worked with City of Lost Children's Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but you'd never know it here. Either he doesn't know much about directing actors, or maybe he only gives directions in French. The effects--especially action scenes involving a digitalized version of Berry--move at such a chaotic, breakneck pace that she looks completely phony. Plus, there's absolutely no sequential logic whatsoever to where Catwoman moves and when--apparently, invisibility is one of her superpowers. These awkward, clumsy scenes are usually accompanied by distractingly loud music. Pitof's only other directing credit is some obscure French flick starring Gerard Depardieu…one hopes Catwoman will be his last.

Bottom Line

No doubt Berry will spend some time licking her wounds from the scathing reviews the film is sure to earn. Hide this Catwoman on a hot tin roof--or anywhere else no one is likely to see it. It's that bad.

Movie

CATWOMAN

Author

anonymous

Date reviewed

2005-10-27 22:16:49

Provider

Review

Ok, so every summer you get a movie which has promised so much but, in the end, is actually pretty bad. Last year the award for most disappointing movie went to Ang Lee's ridiculous and ineffective Hulk. Could Catwoman be in line to snare this year's prize? Well, in a word yes.

As no doubt any Batman fan will be able to tell you, Catwoman was one Selina Kyle, a tormented young woman who turned from a life of crime to help Batman. Well not this movie. This film stars Halle Berry as Patience Price, an ad exec at a large (and crooked) cosmetics company who is killed when when sees something she shouldn't. As happens all too often these days, Patience is bought back to life by a magic cat called Midnight, who bestows all kinds of feline powers on her. She can hiss, leap and probably climb the curtains too (thankfully we never see her litter box) so she decides to use her alter ego to help fight crime and bring down those who had her off-ed.

This cat-astrophe is a disaster in just about every quarter - from Halle's hideous get up which makes her look like dominatrix who's just survived a car wreck to the action pieces which are obviously meant to be both thrilling and titillating, but turn out to be neither.

Berry looks a dead cert to bag a Razzie to go with her Oscar for this movie and joining her in the acting Hall Of Shame are Sharon Stone and Lambert Wilson as the 'evil' company owners, along with Benjamin Bratt as a cop who is little more than a stand-in for where Batman should be.

French director Pitof's flashy and fast-paced direction will probably leave you feeling a tad seasick, such is his inability to concentrate on anything for more than a nanosecond while the images of a superhero navigating a big city skyline was done much better in both Spider-man movies.

Not even one for the 'so bad it's good ' file, Catwoman has just used up all her nine lives in one fell swoop.