Catwoman

When a movie is really bad, you might joke by saying “It’d be easier to list what this movie does RIGHT, than to list what it does wrong”. If I did this for “Catwoman”, this would be the easiest, shortest review I’d ever write. The column labeled “Good” would be completely empty and I’d simply write “EVERYTHING” (notice the capitalization) in the “Bad” column. This 2004 superhero film is an abomination. I knew it sucked back when it was first released, but I didn’t really understand why, or how horrible it really was. Now I’m proud to say that my taste in film has evolved and I can easily pinpoint why exactly this greasy diaper should be thrown into the fires of Mount Doom and its existence stripped from every history book.

You know Catwoman, right? The character from the DC comics that acts as a love interest to Batman? Forget that. This is the movie Catwoman! A timid graphic designer named Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) inherits cat powers when she uncovers a conspiracy by the cosmetics company she works for. Donning a new vigilante persona, she must expose Hedare Beauty CEO George (Lambert Wilson) and his wife Laurel (Sharon Stone) for the murdering crooks that they are. Complicating things is the police detective Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) investigating the feline crime fighter, whom Patience seeks to woo.

The problem with a film like this is that you don’t really know where to start. I guess the portrayal of Catwoman overall is a good point. She’s nothing like the comics, a baffling decision considering the film came out in 2004 when comic book movies really started becoming a thing. We now had the special effects to bring the pages of Marvel and DC to life on the big screen. Literally, everything about the character is different. The costume is this weird nip-slip-waiting-to-happen leather outfit that’s inexplicably strategically torn up to distract the audience of how terrible the acting is. The setting is New York, not Gotham City. Patience is investigating a cosmetics company; she’s not a cat burglar. She isn’t even called Selina Kyle! Did someone forget to remove the filler name when they did a “find-replace” to adopt this crappy script into “Catwoman”?

This picture, only slightly more uninviting than sticking your head into a deep fryer, is a perfect example of what awful superhero films from the early 2000′s were like. First of all, there’s no respect to the source material. They give Catwoman a bunch of superpowers she’s got no business having. They’re not even exciting additions to the mythos of the character because they’re vaguely defined and don’t really add anything to the story. Next, throw in a villain that’s so lame Condiment King (an actual character) would laugh them off the face of the Earth. Finally, throw in a bunch of truly lame puns, a boring love plot no one will care about, every cliché in the book and you’ve got yourself a traumatizing picture no one should ever see.

Even if “Catwoman” was wholly original, it would still be worth building a time machine to erase it from human existence. The special effects featured here are awful. I was going to give the film somewhat of a pass because it’s over 10 years old and technology in the early 2000’s was in that awkward stage where people thought they could use computers to do anything, but they couldn’t really… but then I remembered that this film was released the same year as “Spider-Man 2” and featured a budget of $100 million. It’s a poorly written mess too. There are big leaps in logic throughout, characters’ actions don’t make sense and the plot twists are lame. I’d blame the actors for their excruciating performances and deliveries but I think this was the same sort of thing that happened in “Plan 9 from Outer Space”. More than likely, Halle Berry wanted (or at least subconsciously did) for director Jean-Christophe Comar to scrap the take and try it again, or just throw the entire picture into the trash where it belongs.

I’ll give “Catwoman” this much: there’s so much done wrong here that it is at least a little bit enjoyable to watch with some friends if you know you’re getting into a bad movie. If you like hearing people groan at the lame cat puns you make, if you want to howl at the fakey-looking shots of New York from high up in the air, if you want to muse over the paradox of having a strong female character (TM) that dresses up like a hooker and parades around to Miss-Teeq’s “Scandalous”, if the idea of an ultimate villain armed with nothing but a metal pipe rustles your jimmies, I can theoretically see you having fun. I myself was struck with uncontrollable hysteria a couple of times upon realizing that I actually paid money to put this film on my movie shelf.

Watch any random clip of “Catwoman” and it becomes immediately obvious that the film absolutely deserves a 0-star rating. It’s unbelievably bad. The awfulness is inconceivable. I could go on and on about it, there’s so much to say, but I think I’ve made my point. I’ll likely take this one on again at some point to ridicule and mock but this time, I found it intolerable. (On DVD, May 20, 2016)