What the Hell Were They Thinking?!

Well… at least Halle looks good.

Cast of Characters:
Patience Phillips/Catwoman – Halle Berry
Det. Tom Lone – Benjamin Bratt
George Hedare – Lambert Wilson
Ophelia Powers – Frances Conroy
Sally – Alex Borstein
Laurel Hedare – Sharon Stone

Director – Pitof
Writer – John Brancato, Michael Ferris & John Rogers
Based on characters created by Bob Kane & Bill Finger
Producer – Denise Di Novi & Edward McDonnell
Distributor – Warner Bros. Pictures
Running Time – 104 minutes
Rated PG-13 for action violence and some sensuality.

Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a meek, mild-mannered graphics designer for Hedare Beauty, a cosmetics company that’s soon to release a new, age-reversing skin cream called Beau-Line. Patience, unfortunately, finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time when she overhears a discussion on the product’s dangerous side effects between a scientist and Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone), the – umm – catty wife of company owner George Hedare (Lambert Wilson). When Laurel’s guards discover Patience, they’re ordered to “take care of the matter”, which roughly translates to kill the bitch. Patience tries to escape through a conduit pipe, but they’ve sealed it and flushed her out, drowning her.

She’s dead. The end.

…

Yeah, you wish! Continue on, movie!

Lying on the shore all pathetic and lifeless – much like this film – Patience is mysteriously brought back to life by an Egyptian Mau cat. With the guidance of the Mau’s owner, Ophelia Powers (Frances Conroy), Patience learns that she has been reborn as “Catwoman”, and will avenge the wrongs committed against her using the new powers she’s been bestowed – superhuman reflexes, the ability to land softly on your feet from high places, a smug sense of self-worth, an abhorrent feeling of ingratitude toward owners, and a defiant desire to spray over every damn piece of furniture whenever you damn well please and fuck what your owner thinks of it ’cause they live to serve you, not the other way around.

Naturally, with these great powers come weaknesses of water in any form and a devastating fear of vacuum cleaners.

I’m just kidding; none of that is true. It’s not like Patience becomes an actual pet ca – oh, never mind. Look at that. Patience is, in fact, afraid of rain now. Well, isn’t that cute. Might as well have had her raise up her hind end and blast out a steamy territorial marking all over Benjamin Bratt’s leg.

This shit actually took three writers.

Looking back, one can certainly understand why Warner Bros. would jump at the chance to make a Catwoman film with Halle Berry. On paper, it was a winning formula.

Whoa! Hold on there! Put the torches and gasoline down! I said on paper. Let me explain.

For one, the character of Catwoman is by no means some throwaway side character; she’s one of the most iconic characters from out of the Batman canon. Dating all the way back to 1940, Selina Kyle has become one of the more beloved villains/antiheroes from the Batman series. Not only that, she has also been Batman’s most enduring love interest, with a love-hate component adding a complex spin to their relationship. Secondly, Halle Berry was riding a career high that came with a recent Best Actress win for her incredible performance in Monster’s Ball and additional mainstream success from portraying another well-known comic character, Ororo Munroe, aka Storm, in Fox’s X-Men franchise. Also, by the mid-2000s, the comic book genre was beginning to bounce back from the Joel Schumacher Batman disasters with the aforementioned X-Men movies, as well as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, so you can see why the heads at WB would wanna jump back on the genre bandwagon.

In the right hands, this could’ve been a fun, super stylized exploration of the character’s complex dichotomy, and there’s no doubt that Berry’s acting chops would deliver.

Instead, we got Berry frantically running her face along a ball of catnip like it’s a green, herbal testicle she’s just aching to gag on.

Again… three writers.

Somebody shoot me in the fucking face right now.

6 Fun Cat Facts:

1) Egyptian Mau cats possess great agility, are known to chirp and chortle when stimulated, and can burp superhuman powers into peoples’ mouths.

2) Don’t give cats caffeine. It makes them irritable.

3) Just kidding! Cats are simply assholes by nature, with or without caffeine.

4) Despite the movie’s attempt to convince you otherwise, cats would never leave a “sorry” note following their overnight transgressions due to their innate and highly obnoxious infallibility.

5) Unbeknownst to many cat behavioralists, other feline traits include lippiness, using men as surfboards, and mad, over-sexualized, dick-grinding, Harlem Globetrotter level basketball skills.

6) Cats are extremely and quite easily sexually aroused by car hood ornaments.

9 Lessons Learned (Nine Lives Edition):

1) The legend of Catwoman stretches far back in time throughout history all the way to the Egyptian empire. Remember Joan of Arc and Cleopatra? Yep, they were Catwoman. The pictures at the beginning of this movie said so.

2) The makeup and hair stylist’s idea of making Halle Berry relatable is making her look all shitty and frazzled in frumpy clothes… which for Halle Berry is still 150% hotter than 90% of the rest of the women in the world.

3) “Let me try the remix.” – awwwwwwww, snap!!!! Someone’s vernacular hasn’t left 1989.

4) Lambert Wilson’s character is soooo evil he suffers from a rare evil condition that causes him to involuntarily snarl, sneer and utter wicked “Ha-has!” every five seconds.

5) Ophelia Powers reveals to Patience the real reason why the lore of the Catwoman has been suppressed for all these years – chauvinistic, male academia… oooor it could be that no one believed you ’cause you’re a CRAZY FUCKING CAT LADY!!!!

6) I challenge anyone to take two scissors to their hair, hack away at it like a coked-out Edward Scissorhands, and have it turn out as sexy and sensational as Berry’s, and not the chemo-riddled cancer patient you’d actually end up looking like.

7) Yeah – uh – Patience, the local strip joing called. Candy Pussy’s gonna need her suit back for her routine tonight.

8) Broad spacing of letters – it’s indicative of loneliness.

9) Benjamin Bratt appears to be the only cop serving in a large metropolitan city and has the uncanny ability to appear at every single traffic violation, 911 call, crime scene, interrogation, and school event at the snap of a finger.

I really tried, but I could only make it halfway through the review without uttering a pussy joke.

Catwoman commits many sins, one of them being it having nothing to do with the actual Catwoman character, despite still giving credit to original creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger. See, they changed her name from Selina Kyle to Patience ’cause her character’s timid, meek and… patient. Holy shit! How fucking clever is that?! This film, though, is such dog shit that the biggest surprise it gave me is not witnessing Kane and Finger crawling out of their graves to demand Warner Bros. immediately wipe their names from off the credits of this colossal cinematic clusterfuck. The greatest crime against humanity that Catwoman commits, however, is that it pits Sharon Stone against Halle Berry in a skimpy-attired cat-fight, yet on the titillating scale, it somehow ranks somewhere in between the AIDS epidemic and John Wayne Gacy’s rape and murder of 30+ boys.

Which, of course, means it couldn’t possibly get any sexier.

Hate mail can be sent to the email provided in the contact section.

Should’ve tried the remix, ladies.

The premise to Catwoman is quite simple: Halle Berry looking good in a leather suit. In fact, this film is so stupid simple, and by stupid I actually mean stoooooooopid, would any of us honestly be shocked if it turned out that the script looked a little something like this…

BEGIN OPENING CREDITS

INT. ROOM – NIGHT
Halle Berry looks good in a skin-tight leather outfit.

HALLE BERRY
Purrrr!

BEGIN CLOSING CREDITS

Again, and I hate to keep beating a dead horse here… three writers. Three writers to write what any horny, pubescent kid could fan-fiction the hell out of in their sleep, before furiously masturbating to their Halle Berry collage.

Of course, that’s not all. The folks over at Warner Bros. knew that you obviously can’t make a movie solely on just shots of Halle Berry strutting around in a slutty BDSM cat costume. They needed a plot to pad this shit show out, so they basically slapped on a poor man’s Mary Kay scandal as the film’s driving conflict. Never before has Warner Bros. stooped so low in handling their DC properties.

Wait a minute, Benjamin. You’re actually saying this is worse than Batman & Robin and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace? You’re damn right I’m saying it’s worse. Granted, the margin between them is practically invisible, ’cause Superman IV and Batman & Robin are still, no doubt, dumpster fires at the very bottom of the comic book film barrel. That said, if there’s any defense those two shit shows can boast against this slightly greater evil, it’s that their plots don’t hinge on an evil bottle of Olay.

Director Pitof – who I believe on his off days works as a Middle Eastern rice dish – and his dream team of writers strain harder than is humanly possible to stretch out what is essentially shots of Halle Berry looking hot into a full feature-length film, and it’s impossible for them to fail any worse. Catwoman is a tricky type of character to handle, one that can either work like a charm or stink up your film. The trifecta of Julie Newmar, Eartha Kitt and Lee Meriwether fit the campy tone of the TV series and its movie. Michelle Pfeiffer’s saucy portrayal fit Tim Burton’s bizarro world like a glove, and Anne Hathaway’s grounded, femme fatale cat burglar in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises also worked very well. I’m not sure what the hell Pitof was going for her. Berry’s Catwoman is less a moniker for her character and more a state of being.

Hey, look at that. She likes raw fish and tuna! Get it? Hey, guys!! Get it?! ‘Cause she’s a cat.

Imagine if in Spider-Man Tobey Maguire caught Green Goblin, then wrapped the villain entirely in a silk cocoon and stored him in his sticky web to save him later for dinner.

‘Cause that’s what spiders do.

Or, keeping things strictly DC related, why not just have Bruce Wayne shit guano?

Not a single aspect of this film works. The chemistry between Halle Berry and Benjamin Bratt is flatline; in fact, there seems to be more romantic tension between her and Alex Borstein as her BFF, but that could just be ’cause Borstein’s character comes off like she’s willing and ready to fuck anything that moves within five feet of her. Sharon Stone as the villain is, at best, laughable (coincidentally, the name of Berry’s character in the live-action Flintstones film was Sharon Stone), and the cherry on top of her shit performance is watching her character’s death fall shatter every law of physics as she pinwheels down from the top of the skyscraper all the way to the ground with nary a tiny spot of blood to be found from the impact. Then again, I’m not sure why I’m nitpicking the film’s physics when Bratt manages to race up three stories of stairs to rescue Berry in like three seconds, so physics be damned. I’ve seen better CGI in even the shittiest Atari game, and the action sequences, which are chopped up into a million little millisecond cuts, are so incoherent and nauseating it makes the worst example of shaky-cam look like Birdman.

Speaking of the technical aspects, I have to go a little further into them ’cause this movie is so incompetently made, and yet it still somehow had a $100 million price tag slapped on it. It’s not like this film needed to be Nolan-esque, far from it. But when the script is this bad, you’d think you’d put a little more effort into making sure the style and tone were on point. I’m not sure what Pitof’s vision was for the shot selection, but I wouldn’t be surprised if his original idea was to have the scenes split up into nine different panels a la The Brady Bunch to capture every single characters’ expression and spoken bit of dialogue. Instead, when someone wisely suggested that would be a very stupid idea, Pitof then chose to just cut to everyone’s individual expression and spoken bit of dialogue. At one point, the film cuts frenetically between one delivering a presentation to… oh – wow, look. It’s the same guy in the same place delivering the same presentation. And I swear to God I saw one moment where Bratt is having a conversation with Berry, and in the midst of the conversation, the scene cuts to her just to see her blink before cutting back to Bratt.

You know, ’cause that blink is so pertinent to the development of their relationship.

Worst of all the unforgivable wrongs committed here is Halle Berry’s performance. Now, to be fair, Berry’s owned this failure like a pro, and kudos to her for having a sense of humor about it, but damn, she is absolutely atrocious here. That’s not an exaggeration either. Her performance is horrible beyond words, and I can’t think of a more tragic post-Oscar win fall from grace… not named Cuba Gooding, Jr. For starters, as hot as the suit looks, all that exposed flesh has to make it the least useful superhero costume ever built. Secondly, Berry’s trying way too hard to be sexy. I know what you’re thinking. Someone so clearly hideous as Berry must bend over backward just to even pass as appealing. It’d be easy to throw all the blame at the writers for giving her such horrendous dialogue to choke on, and yes, it’s true as the saying goes that an actor is only as good as their director and screenwriter allows them to be (for the most part), but Berry deserves every bit of blame hurled her way for the God awful delivery she gives to each line. Every “purr”, “meow” and dopey cat-related pun that oozes out of that mouth of hers manages to do what I thought could never ever ever be done: turn an incredibly gorgeous woman into a cringe-inducing, boner-killing nightmare.

Is it too late to go back and try the remix?

Judgment: In the end, it doesn’t matter how good Halle Berry looks in skin-tight leather. Catwoman is a studio-packaged turd so mindless, so soulless and so vomit-inducing gaudy you could multiply Berry’s sex appeal by infinity and a half and it still would fall far, far short of redeeming this colossal failure. All the combined forces of every brand of the world’s strongest scented kitty litters would be no match in combating the foul stench emanating from this shit-heap of a film.

Sentence: Fifty years of loud noises, jingling collars, car rides, aggressive petting, hours upon hours of trying on cutesy costumes, and long, excruciatingly drawn-out baths.

About Post Author