Today’s quick review: Catwoman. Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a mild-mannered artist working for a beauty company who accidentally learns the dark secret behind her company’s new beauty cream. The company’s unscrupulous head George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) has her killed to keep her quiet, but a mystic cat revives her and grants her catlike powers. With new abilities and new confidence, Patience sets about bringing Hedare to justice as the vigilante Catwoman.
Catwoman is a superhero movie loosely based on the DC comic book character. Catwoman follows the pattern of most superhero origin stories, but its execution leaves much to be desired. Halle Berry’s Catwoman has little in common with her predecessors beyond a whip and a cat motif. The classy cat burglar of previous incarnations is replaced by an edgy vigilante with murky motivations who behaves like she is possessed.
The intended transformation is from meek, ordinary Patience to confident, unrestrained Catwoman, but the character gets lost somewhere in between. The Catwoman persona seems to shunt Patience’s aside for nocturnal adventures, a protagonist that doesn’t grow so much as get rewritten. Patience is not a satisfying character, while the Catwoman persona is too erratic to take seriously.
Furthermore, the movie embraces all aspects of being a cat, resulting in a bizarre heroine who is vulnerable to catnip and is distracted by shiny objects. These moments could have been played for humor, but the film plays them just straight enough that it is hard to laugh. With a stronger protagonist, these would just be seen as quirky side effects of the transformation, but instead they just contribute to the impression that Patience is not right in the head.
The action should be the film’s saving grace, and to some extent it is. Apart from some peculiar leap physics, slightly dated CGI, and too much twirling, Catwoman does not have terrible combat. The heroine’s acrobatics are used in a few clever ways, and a better movie could have been built around the fight scenes. Even these fights lack vision, though: Catwoman rarely fights anyone significant or challenging, putting the half-decent choreography to waste.
The rest of the film is a series of lackluster choices. The evil cosmetics corporation plot is uncompelling. The love interest ranges from dull to awkward. The characters are unsympathetic. The writing borders on cringeworthy. The supernatural elements are handled poorly and add little to the plot. The moral is muddied by Catwoman’s split personality. The outfit is tasteless. The “hip” soundtrack just sounds cheap. Catwoman goes the wrong direction on nearly everything.
Watch Catwoman if you want to see Halle Berry lose her mind and start behaving like a cat. As a superhero movie, Catwoman offers very little. As a trainwreck, it is mildly amusing. Skip it if you are looking for a good film, especially if you are a fan of the superhero genre.
3.3 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 4.0 for a reasonable concept ruined by a series of bad choices.