Overall Rating
  Awesome: 4.2%
Worth A Look: 8.39%
Average: 6.29%
Pretty Bad: 13.29%
Total Crap: 67.83%
7 reviews, 101 user ratings
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| Catwoman |
by Rob Gonsalves
"Oh, c'mon, it's not THAT bad."
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"Catwoman," a stylish piece of kitten-with-a-whip empowerment pulp, is much better than it had to be and a lot better than many Internet critics, eager to hate it, wanted it to be.It doesn't scale the perverse heights of Tim Burton's Batman Returns, in which the punishing spark between Catwoman (played then by Michelle Pfeiffer) and Batman launched a thousand leather-fetish theme parties. Nor does it indulge in the over-the-top satire of Daniel Waters' famous unfilmed Catwoman script (widely perusable online). It's more of an athletic you-go-girl fable in the tradition of the Charlie's Angels movies, in which what the heroine does and how she looks doing it are equally important. I was almost disappointed by how solid the movie is -- I'd expected it to be a laughable campfest, but it stays just this side of the ridiculous.
Halle Berry's Patience Phillips follows in the pawprints of Pfeiffer's earlier character: she's a put-upon wage slave toiling for a chilly, remote mega-executive who has her killed when she learns too much. It's a decent starting point for a franchise (if this turns out to be one), and we learn that there's a long line of Catwomen dating back to ancient Egypt; perhaps other actresses can step in for future Catwoman adventures -- my top five would include Fairuza Balk, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Julianna Margulies. Berry, playing her second African-American superheroine, gives Patience the necessary cringing awkwardness that turns into a feline avidity once she's resurrected by a mysterious cat named Midnight.
Hooking Patience up with a good-hearted cop (Benjamin Bratt, who has the heroic jaw to be a passable Batman stand-in) makes for some amusing cat-and-mouse games -- he's supposed to be on Catwoman's trail, but, like so many clueless people in superhero movies, never recognizes the superhero's eyes or voice. I wish Catwoman's attraction to him were tied into her new cat identity a bit more, though, and it might've been fun to have her fall for a bad-boy type that the cop would have to compete with for her attention. The movie oversells the cop's decency a bit -- he's shown telling schoolkids to "be the good guys," for Christ's sake -- but I guess that's so the script won't come off as man-bashing.
The official villains -- the husband-and-wife king and queen of a cosmetics company, which makes a beauty cream that has addictive and disfiguring side effects -- feel a little ripped off from the first Batman movie, in which the Joker tainted various products with Smylex. But it brings Sharon Stone (as the company's over-the-hill supermodel) back into the fold as an ice bitch, for which we can be grateful. There's more than a little self-aware bitterness in Stone's performance; maybe she's acting out some resentment at having been elevated to a sex goddess and punished for it in the same stroke. After a string of nondescript roles that coaxed some good work out of Stone but seemed like conscientious attempts to go "serious," it's good to see her being bad again. Camille Paglia should approve of the performance.
Catwoman was directed by a former visual-effects whiz named Pitof, whose previous feature, 2001's Vidocq, was a baroquely entertaining murder mystery (it finally made it onto American DVD under the title Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq). Pitof has an eye for bold comic-book imagery, such as when Catwoman prowls the night in her leather get-up, silhouetted against the city lights or the moon (always full, of course). A few of the action sequences, especially a headache-inducing motorcycle ride, are way too choppy for my tastes, and computer animators still haven't figured out how to make a CGI cat move convincingly. The effects work best in the subtler moments, when Patience is walking around her apartment dishing about her cop boyfriend and hopping up on countertops and furniture with a feline grace.But most of the movie is fast and fun, and undeserving of the critical hissing it's getting in some quarters. It must be time for a Halle Berry backlash, or maybe some people are still uncomfortable with a $100 million summer film placing a heroic African-American woman front and center.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10221&reviewer=416
originally posted: 12/28/06 10:18:04
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USA
23-Jul-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 18-Jan-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
16-Sep-2004
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