#83 Catwoman (Wes)

Catwoman

In The Simpsons episode Mr Plow, Homer, Lisa and Bart meet Adam West who shows his disgust at Batman Returns with the classic line “Michelle Pfeiffer? Ha! The only true Catwoman is Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, or Eartha Kitt”. Personally I loved Batman Returns and thought Pfeiffer was excellent as Catwoman, but I had pretty much the exact same thought as West when I found out that I had to watch Halle Berry in Catwoman.

Halle Berry plays Patience Phillips, a graphic designer for cosmetics company Hedare Beauty. Whilst visiting one of the company’s factories, she overhears Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone) and scientist Dr Ivan Slavicky (Peter Wingfield) talking about some dangerous side effects of their new skin cream. Patience is caught and killed whilst attempting to escape, but don’t worry dear reader, as some cats bring her back to life. From this point Patience adopts the alter ego of Catwoman and becomes a cat burglar who is also seeking revenge for her death. To make her life more difficult, Catwoman is framed for the murder of company owner George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) by Laurel, who is now running Hedare Beauty. Catwoman finally confronts her and attempts to stop her releasing her deadly skin cream into the market.

That’s right, this is a film about a costumed vigilante fighting to stop a dangerous skin cream from going on sale. Somebody seriously thought this was a good idea for a story. Actually three people thought this was a good idea. Three actual real life people sat around and came up with the story for this together. Not one of them actually turned to the other two and said “isn’t this idea not only stupid, but also incredibly boring?”

It’s a well-known philosophical idea that if you give an infinite number of monkeys and infinite amount of typewriters then they’d eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare just through the process of random key hitting. Of course long before that you’d have to wipe all the excrement off of the sheets of paper (an infinite amount of monkeys would produce an infinite amount of shit flinging), and that infinite pile of monkey dung would actually be the basis for the Catwoman script.

I’m not entirely sure how so many Hollywood writers seem to make such a hash of superhero films. Up until recently most movies based on comic books ranged from average at best, to absolutely dire. There are many exceptions to this of course, but for some reason movie companies historically didn’t understand the potential that these movies could have.

But at first glance Catwoman is a strange one to mess up. Limping out of the 80s Batman franchise seven years after the last movie was made Catwoman probably should have been made much sooner. However, as a character Catwoman has always been very popular in the DC comics and has had her own spin off comic series. In fact she was once ranked 11^th on IGNs “Top 100 Comic Book Villains of All Time” list.

The fact that she is a powerful female character, who is quite often more than a match for Batman surely should be something that movie houses would celebrate. This could have been a potentially brilliant film, but for some reason it was never allowed to live up to its promise.

Unfortunately not only did the writers come up with the most boring story that’s ever been in a superhero movie, they also produced a script so dull and lifeless that the only decent thing to do with it would have been to take it out to the barn and shoot it in the head before it infected any other nearby screenplays.

It shocks me that this film actually attracted the likes of Halle Berry. Maybe she had such fun playing Storm in X-Men that she wanted to try her hand in other superhero movies? Or perhaps she should really just sack her manager? Whatever the reason, it’s clear than any talent that she has as an actress was so wasted in this movie, that she decided not to bother using the slightest bit of it. Her performance is so poor it makes Madonna’s acting look like it’s nearly good enough to be in one of the Star Wars prequels.

Of course you can’t just blame Berry. Everybody involved in this movie seems to have taken acting lessons from Jake Lloyd. There isn’t a single decent performance in the whole movie, which possibly explains why the director (Pitof – So crap they named him once) decided that everything in this movie needed MORE CGI.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen CGI effects used more often and more pointlessly outside of a George Lucas redux. It’s so bad that pretty much every time Catwoman moves, then you’re watching a computer generated character. Unfortunately, whilst some films are capable of doing this without looking like a character has just been plonked into the middle of the movie with no thought of whether they look like they belong onscreen, this one fails miserably. Catwoman looks about as fake Snooki, and I don’t believe for one second that either one of them could ever actually exist in the real world.

But its not just the actors who get CGIed. The cat that brings Catwoman back to life is also computer generated. I may sound a little old fashioned here, but maybe of they tried using a real life cat then it would have not only looked better, but would have been cheaper too. I’m actually just a little suspicious that they did this at first, but when they realised it out acted all the people in the movie, they decided to save them some embarrassment and animate the cat. I’m not sure they should have bothered.

 

If you really need a Catwoman fix, then you should watch Batman Returns, or catch the old TV show (I wasn’t particularly impressed by Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises either), just avoid this the flea-ridden movie. Like a cat that makes smart arsed comments and steals your lasagne this film is one kitty that nobody would cry over if it were put to sleep.