Kitty Litter
Somebody call a vet- this one needs to be put down. (Film Review)
By Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: Watching it is slightly less torture than the rack, but that's just my subjective opinion.
The Downside: You get to see everything that Spider-Man 2 reminded you was good about the movies burned in effigy.
How is this for existential irony- coming not a month after what is probably the best comic book superhero movie ever made, Spider-Man 2, we now have Catwoman, which easily slides into the costume of one of the worst. I go to the movies a lot, but it's been a very long time since I've seen a film that is this stuttering in its logic, this airless in its execution, and completely full of itself when it can't be said to have a single thing to be proud of.
To its sole benefit, I can't say whether Catwoman is either clueless or contemptuous of the intelligence of its audience. But what I do know is that it is so much of an abyssal plunge into the realms of lazy plotting, annoying characterizations, and abysmal dialogue that it passes down below the minimum mark of artistic capability for every human being on the planet. There are bad movies like King Arthur, which fail because some part of the whole filmmaking process fails. However, a disaster like Catwoman seems like it could only come about from people trying to make it this bad. Remember the old analogy about how if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters that they'll eventually type out the works of Shakespeare? Well, think about the script of this movie and you know what those monkeys would use as toilet paper.
Like every other superhero story, Catwoman is about some meek and modest cog in the machinery of life whose world opens up to them when they realize that they can fly or shoot webs or, in this case, jump up and off walls like a cat (or Richard Simmons on crack). Here, the unsuspecting soul is Patience Phillips (Halle Berry), an advertising artist who works for an insanely powerful cosmetics company (can you imagine what their D.C. lobby is like?) in an office populated by "buddy" characters rejected from some of the worst sit-coms you've ever seen. Patience is painted as being demure to the point she's wandering into doormat territory, until the night she discovers the toxic secret behind one of her company's new products and armed guards kill her to shut her up. At least, that's until (again) an Egyptian cat god breathes life back into her and she becomes Catwoman. Uh-huh.
There is no beginning or end to the problems that plague this movie, but let's start here. For some reason, somebody decided to dress Catwoman in the outfit of the ultimate example of a woman's liberation and empowerment- and apparently they were able to pitch this with a straight face. The movie's tagline, "Freedom is power," makes for great copy, but one has to wonder what it is that Patience feels she is so oppressed by. She's such a confrontation-phobe she doesn't even bother calling the police to complain about the noise from a rave party going on in the apartment next to her. She's held down more by her own head-case, Freudian issues than any element of the outside world. And what about the after picture? Once she discovers that she has cat-like reflexes and an affinity for tuna, she dresses up (or down, depending on your point of view) in a black leather two-piece complete with bull whip. Is this what its come to? The Kill Bill movies featured a strong female character acting on her own initiative without regard to her image. Catwoman seems to equate a woman's empowerment with becoming the representation of every male's S&M fantasy.
I know that realism isn't an extremely valued commodity in superhero stories, even the good ones. After all, how much fun would Superman have been if we kept being nagged by the thought that people just can't fly? However, unless you're making a commercial for chewing gum you need some basic degree of logic for a story to work. Catwoman doesn't even have this. After she is "reborn," Patience decides to exact vengeance on the ones who killed her. The problem? According to Patience herself, she remembers nothing about the night she died; what she was doing, where she was, etc... So why is it that the first place she starts snooping around is her company and following one of the goons who offed her? Everything else that follows is tied together by characters who nudge the story alone by explaining things in winded bursts of expository dialogue that would have the instructor in even a beginner's writing workshop seeing red. Tie to this the vomit-inducing one liners ("What a purr-fect idea!") and you'll be likely to think the same thing I was- the first people Catwoman should have taken that whip to were the screenwriters.
Berry has been in much better movies than this; even the X-Men films, where she played the weather-controlling mutant Storm, seem like literary works of art in comparison. Frankly, she doesn't work here because I just didn't buy her as a wallflower. She plays Patience like a person on pause, just waiting to get out and strut and swagger. Sharon Stone just plain looks miserable as the villainous wife of a cosmetics magnet, which, all considering, I won't fault her for. Benjamin Bratt also shows up as the requisite love interest, a New York cop who first meets Patience on the ledge of her apartment building (don't ask) and then gets beaten by her in a cutesy game of one and one (because we all know how proficient cats are at basketball). Bratt simply looks like he wants to pick up the phone at any minute and ask Dick Wolf if he's hiring again.
For every measure that Spider-Man 2 was inspiriting and thoughtful, Catwoman plunges everything we loved about that movie into a rocket dive towards the lowest common denominator. This is simply trash; bland and boring if you don't take it seriously, frustrating and insulting if you do. In Ancient Egypt, cats were glorified and when one died, it was mummified and buried. I'd recommend a similar fate for Catwoman; not out of any reverence, but simply because crap like this doesn't need to see the light of day again. F