Catwoman

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a pathetically meek graphic designer at a cosmetics firm who's also so utterly f*cking thick she does such idiotic things as risking her life by climbing onto a building to rescue a cat!However,one day she inadvertently learns that her bosses are planning to release an addictive anti-ageing cream (?!?) onto the shelves,and finds her life coming to a premature end.Or,is that beginning,as she finds herself turning into Catwoman,heroic defender of law and bringer of justice.

There is a distinctly cruel irony whereby a film can end up receiving so many bad reviews (which are meant to deter people from watching the film!) people end up watching it anyway...just to see how bad it is.I suppose on the basis of that,I should seek out 1998's The Avengers sometime.I'd like to give Showgirls a go sometime too (I missed it when they showed it on Channel 4 recently.) Yep,in terms of 2004's most major cinematic disaster,Catwoman was,well,not to put too fine a pun on it,the cat that got the cream.Opening to abominable reviews,from everyone from Empire to Zoo magazine,it was ushered out of cinemas during the 'summer blockbuster' period almost as quickly as it was released.It then placed it's lead star in the embarrassing position of accepting a razzie award having earned an Oscar for her devastating turn in Monster's Ball only a few years earlier.

It is a pretty dreadful film,but there are arguably a lot worse.It's main problem is the story,which is so uninteresting,but the same could be said of the action on display.Also,this is a film that's managed a pretty notorious achievement.It makes Halle Berry look unsexy.The first suit we see her strutting around in is okay and fairly pleasing to the eye,but the main one (the one she's in on the poster) is really unsexy and unflattering.

If you want to engage your curiosity value,go right ahead,but I hope you know what you're letting yourself in for.**

Oh my, where do I begin? Well I could tell you that this is a well made action movie, but obviously I would be lying my head off. So instead, I want to tell you the truth. Are you ready? Here it comes… "DON'T SEE THIS MOVIE" Let me tell you why. If you see this movie and are over the age of 16, you will end up hating yourself for letting yourself rot for 104 minutes without getting anything back, except an increased feeling of wanting to get revenge on Hollywood. They say that it is very hard to get your script into a movie. Well, after seeing this movie, I think a one legged monkey could write a better script, without either pen or paper. The fact that Halle Berry even uses a male stunt double, makes me loose all respect for both her and this movie. Besides the stunt double thing, the movie still sucks. The dialog sucks, the acting is not even present and the action looks sloppy and poorly thought through. This movie actually made me like The Core better, which is pretty much impossible. I rate this movie 1/10

I'm tempted to write a long piece explaining why this film was so bad, but I can all too easily summarise by saying "Everything".

It was poorly acted, predictable, unenthralling, clichéd nonsense. And that was just the first half hour, at which point, for the sake of my brain and stopping it melting with the sheer tedium, I walked out of the cinema.

If you're genuinely sad enough to believe that paying good money to see Halle Berry in a PVC suit is good enough reason to spend time gawking at this trash, then fine. Who am I to try to persuade you to try and do something more valuable with your time, like base-jumping without a parachute?

Utterly abysmal

I scored a free ticket to this movie, and I thought, hey, I've wasted my whole life up to now, what's another hundred and forty-one minutes? After all, I have a higher tolerance for crap than most people, and, once in a while, I like to see something that completely sucks. According to the critics and to voters on IMDb, Catwoman is supposed to suck bad. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the movie really doesn't suck. I mean, yeah, it sucks, but it hardly plumbs the depths of true suckitude. Currently it sits at #35 on the IMDb bottom 100, but I can think of way more than 34 other movies that suck far worse than Catwoman. It is much more fair to say that it is a mediocre, perhaps slightly below average, action film. It has a few pros and lots of cons. The cons first: 1) The jumpy editing is awful. 2) Way too much CGI. Same problem with the 500 pound gorilla comic book movie out right now, as well. CGI is probably the worst thing ever to happen to cinema; it's hard to believe people are worshiping a technique that looks more fake than stop-motion. 3) Benjamin Bratt is a horrible actor, and the ugliest handsome man I've ever seen. 4) How the f*ck did Alex Borstein land a movie role? She should be doomed to die on MAD TV, the longest running train wreck of a show ever. 5) Crappy, crappy script. The pros: 1) The film looks wonderful, even though that's due mostly to the CGI (I guess when it's making buildings and inanimate objects like that, it's not so bad). The costume design, even apart from the Catwoman outfit. And if they gave out Oscars to hair stylists, the ones who worked on this film would have no competition. 2) Sharon Stone – not a great performance, by any means. Her character is downright silly, perhaps even nonsensical. But she's gorgeous and has a great presence. She makes a really boring villain somewhat more interesting. 3) Duh! Halle Berry! She might not have the best ability to choose roles. Perhaps she's just obsessed with money, and now that she's got a statuette, she's going to do everything in her power to become a billionaire. Whatever you can say about her, she's a great actress. Last year, she brought Gothika up a notch, and she does a lot to make Catwoman more entertaining than it ought to be. She plays the characters' two halves, the sweet, insecure girl and the dominatrix, very well. And, come on, I'd be lying if I said I didn't go to the movie because I thought Berry would be walking around in a leather outfit for a good portion of the movie. And, damn, she's hot. This makes the movie watchable, if nothing else. There's a shot where the camera circles Berry from toe to head right after she first dons the Catwoman which was worth the price of me embarrassing myself by handing my free pass over to the cute little theater girl at the counter. 5/10.

Oh, where to start...imagine all the intellectual depth of Showgirls, plus all the excessive and ridiculous special effects of Charlie's Angels, and then throw in some dialog crafted by whomever wrote for Governor Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze in the fourth Batman movie, and only then are you even close to a movie as awful as this.

I suppose one should not expect much from a director who actually refers to himself as Pitof. But let's come back to that. Let's move on to Halle Berry. Note to Halle Berry: Letting Billy Bob Thornton ream you endlessly on camera is certainly degrading, but it was also a good career move--and you won an Oscar; feverishly eating catnip and licking people's faces on camera, however, is not a good career move--and you'll probably win a Razzie this time. They make you return Oscars for movies like this. Oh yeah, as for the supernatural explanation for Patience Phillips/Catwoman's superhero status--she gets CPR from an immortal Egyptian cat--I am not kidding.

And then there is Benjamin Bratt, who happens to be a pretty solid actor, but could have very likely damaged a good career. If his participation in this movie isn't enough to stigmatize him, then I'm sure he had to pass up a lot of good roles because of all the time he spent having his foot surgically removed from his former agent's rectum. There is a scene in this movie--probably the worst, and that's no small achievement--that is reminiscent of that ridiculous scene in Daredevil where Jennifer Garner/Elektra and Ben Affleck/blind superhero have a Kung Fu fight at a playground in broad daylight; in this movie it's Halle Berry and Ben Bratt playing one-on-one hoops and her doing Catwoman flips and yet no one appears to be too amazed by this, much less pants-soiling surprised, and on top of that it has a sort of VH1/Color Me Bad/early New Edition video feel to it. And I'm really not sure what city this is all supposed to take place in--Gotham, Metropolis, the land beneath the whole in the cutting room floor--but apparently this place only has one detective, the unfortunate Bratt. No matter what the crime is--burglary, murder, domestic disturbance, interrupted ballet performance--he's always there.

As for the rest of the cast, that annoying woman from Mad TV--I know that's not specific enough; I mean the most annoying one who plays what I guess is supposed to be some bizarre Asian lady--well, she plays Catwoman's annoying and sort of slutty co-worker comic relief since Rosie O'Donnell was apparently unavailable.

And then we come to Sharon Stone. Now I know her career is going down the crapper with all deliberate speed, but it's still hard to understand this one. The only thing I can guess is that the opportunity to break into silly, pseudo-feminist diatribes made this a role she couldn't turn down. Of course Sharon has often lamented the lack of good roles for older women in Hollywood, and she's absolutely right about that, but this is not the best way to lodge a complaint, and plus that's always been a little peculiar coming from an actress whose greatest cinematic achievement is the conspicuous exposure of her labia.

Briefly back to this Pitof character--I thought that pretentious one-named idiot who did the Charlie's Angels movies--McG, I believe--was bad enough, but this guy is even more shameless and obviously lacking in talent. What's with these guys who've never made a movie and are already going by only one name? Don't you have to work up to that? I mean if is Scorsese wants to go by Marty, fine; if Tarantino wants to be just Quentin, or even just Q, whatever, but where does a hack like this get off using one name? This movie deserves every Razzie it receives, and while some reviewers may say it's not really that bad, remember, it took a lot of money to make this godawful thing, and if people don't speak out about how dreadful it really is, they just might make Catwoman 2. Can you live with that?