Catwoman (2004)

With THE DARK KNIGHT being the current topic of discussion, I re-read my (extremely dated) review of CATWOMAN from 2004, which I feel is still worthy of conversation. Or not. Either way.

Mee-Ouch
Review: Catwoman
Dir: Pitof
by erik kristopher myers

Have you ever seen a really horrible car accident? The kind where three vehicles are piled up in the middle of the highway? The kind where heads go through windshields and blood covers the pavement? The kind that’s so terrible that you can’t bear to look, but at the same time, you can’t bear to look away...?

Warner Brothers is now charging ten bucks to see one, and it’s called Catwoman.

I’ve made no secret of my contempt for this film. After three decades of piss-poor attempts to bring iconic characters to the big screen, we’re only just beginning to see it done correctly. This is a glorious time to be a geek, a time in which the advancements in special effects allow anything to be possible; and with the public so willing to give “dorky” characters like Spider-Man a 300 million-plus payday, the opportunity is perfect to roll out characters we’ve always wanted to see realized. It wasn’t always like this, though, a point that’s important to remember.

Fire up the Wayback Machine, folks: it’s time for a history lesson.

For a while there, Marvel couldn’t get it right. You had shitty TV translations of Spidey and The Hulk, both of which traded costumed supervillians for bank robbers in leisure suits. Feature films were no more kind: both The Punisher and Captain America ended up going straight to video (with very good reason, too), while Roger Corman’s infamous adaptation of The Fantastic Four was shelved upon completion (though bootlegs are obtainable to those who know where to look). In short, Marvel and its superhero properties were something of a joke within the fan community, to say nothing of the film industry itself.

On the flipside, you had DC, owned by Warner Brothers. Now, granted, only two of DC’s iconic characters received the big screen treatment, but to be fair about it, they were the two that really mattered: Superman and Batman. Both were successful during their run, and both began to show their age around the third film before gasping and wheezing their way through an arthritic fourth (and final) film. After 1997’s embarrassing Batman and Robin, it seemed that Warner Brothers had driven the final nail into The Comic Book Movie, because after all: if DC couldn’t get it right, who could? Marvel? Cue hysterical laughter here.

And then came Blade. And X-Men. And Spider-Man. And so on. And further. The Marvel revolution began in 1998, and Comic Book Movies were redefined. Sure, we got a couple of clunkers in there (Daredevil, you son of a bitch, you), but overall, it was a starling leap forward in quality. The Marvel Age was here.

Warner Brothers, however, seemed absolutely clueless on how to combat this unexpected threat, having now lost their status as the reigning champs in this long-running battle. They did well on the animation front (Batman being one of the finest examples of the genre), but their big screen translations languished in Development Hell. The new Superman, which has only just gotten back on track (read my thoughts here) went through more directors than Jenna Jameson does in the course of a week; and Batman is only just finally reappearing under the guidance of Momento’s Christopher Nolan, though early script reviews have been wishy-washy at best. Add to this the dubious casting of Jack Black as The Green Lantern (reported here) and you’ve got a future that—at best—is troubling, to say the least.

Which brings us to Catwoman.

With Spider-Man 2 doing huge worldwide business, Warner Brothers decided to bring out the big guns this summer: they took a hugely popular character, cast Halle Berry in the lead role, and then proceeded to fuck everything up. If Spidey was a character that appealed to geeky, lonely boys, then Catwoman was going to target the female audience and appeal to a demographic that didn’t normally pay to see these kinds of films. Makes sense, right?

Too much sense, if you ask me. See, Catwoman isn’t just a bad movie: it’s a nearly unwatchable movie, and represents an absolute lack of understanding of how to make a four-colour character work on the big screen. As far as big-screen adaptations go, DC has become the new “old Marvel.”

Halle Berry plays Patience Phillips (a name that could only exist in a Halle Berry movie), a mousy (ha ha!) woman who works for cosmetic conglomerate Hedare Industries, owned and managed by power couple George (Lambert Wilson) and Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone). When Patience discovers that the Hedares’ new beauty cream, Beau-Line, has a toxic secret (it turns living flesh into marble over a period of time), she’s murdered by Laurel’s goons and dumped in the river. Through the spiritual intervention by the worst CG cat ever brought to the screen, Patience is reborn as the latest in a line of “cat women,” who wear cheesy masks and freely assert their independence in a world run by misogynistic men. Vowing to bring down the corporation that murdered her, Patience becomes a hyper-sexual super heroine who is wrongly accused of crimes she didn’t commit by the cop she dates by day (Benjamin Bratt) while kicking ass at night to some of the worst R&B music in recent memory.

Okay, so now that that’s out of the way, let’s first look at this from the Fanboy Perspective. I dig Catwoman, okay? She’s a great character. She’s pretty hot, too. This, however, is not Catwoman.

Sprung from the pages of Batman in 1940, Catwoman is no avenging heroine who battles for Truth, Justice and the American Way. She’s a thief. Sometimes she’s a killer. And if you read Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, she’s also kinda-sorta a prostitute. Her name is Selina Kyle, and she lives in Gotham City (which has been written out in the film), eludes Batman (also written out of the film), and is less concerned with the effects of face cream on an unsuspecting public than she is with robbing the finest museums. Catwoman is a morally ambiguous character not particularly suited for a solo outing (a concern many have for next year’s Elektra, which shows every sign of being a similar creative disaster); so it’s important that the story be strong enough to support the endeavor.

It isn’t. In fact, the film isn’t entertaining on any level whatsoever. I was shocked to read that the running time is a mere ninety-one minutes, as the film feels a good half hour too long. Catwoman is an endurance test, and the urge to leave the theatre is a recurring (and wholly understandable) thing. The filmmakers have absolutely no idea how to handle the source material, and end up shoehorning the character into a completely unrelated concept. “Hey, let’s remake The Crow and call it Catwoman!” Burn, Hollywood, burn.

The movie isn’t simply offensive to comic book fans like myself: it’s also rather offensive to men in general. Hey, if you want to be honest about it, it’s pretty offensive to women, as well. I’m all for Girl Power sentiments and Women’s Lib, bra burning, etc. However, Catwoman lays it on so thick that it becomes apparent how flawed the message here really is.

First of all, the character of Patience Phillips is depicted as being a nerdy, unattractive woman because she’s natural. Her hair is long and not particularly fashionable, and she wears little to no make-up. Once she’s “killed” and reborn, we get the Halle Berry we all know and revile, complete with a Supercuts hack job, bad designer clothing and more make-up than a two dollar whore. The idea is that she’s becoming assertive, and the external manifestation of this internal change is an image fat girls all over America are ramming their fingers down their throats to emulate. Appearance is everything, the movie tells us, unless you’re Alex Borstein from Mad TV, in which case some hunk is gonna throw himself at you because you’ve got lots of “personality.” The film can’t even decide what message it’s trying to send.

CONTINUED:

Part of this change is the realization that men are bad on almost every level. According to Catwoman, they’ll cheat on you and leave you for younger women once you hit forty; and even if you find a “good” man, he’ll end up betraying you or doubting your claims of innocence despite the fact that you’re telling the truth. Even if he realizes this in the end, he’s just baggage: an Independent Woman can’t be burdened by something as restrictive as a “relationship.” In fact, the only man you can trust is the flamboyantly gay guy who works in the cubicle next to you and acts like a bad stereotype.

We receive oodles of groan-worthy information about The Cat Throughout History, delivered with a straight face by Six Feet Under’s Frances Conroy (playing Ophelia Powers, a name that phonetically translates into “Oh, feel ya powers!”), all of which reinforces the notion that strong women break rules and stand on their own two feet. This is exemplified by Patience dressing like a whore and teasing men without any intention of putting the manhole where her mouth is. In other words: Girl Power = Cock Tease. The character of Catwoman in the comics is supposed to be a vixen, no doubt about it; but no lifestyle messages are meant to be inferred from this, and she’s hardly presented as role model.

As if all this didn’t already perpetuate a negative image, the writers fill out the proceedings with plenty of Girlie Stuff intended to lure (and presumably entertain) the female audience, and again, it’s all bad stereotyping. Where does our heroine work? At a cosmetics company! What sort of perils does she encounter? Being stuck at the top of a ferris wheel with a hot guy! What kind of superpowers does her adversary have? Beauty cream-enhanced skin! Where does she battle crime? At a high-scale Cirque du Soleil knock-off! All she needed was a vacuum cleaner as a weapon for the list of clichés to be complete.

And what about Pitof, the notoriously English-challenged director? For a moment—a very brief moment—I almost had faith in his visual style. Then it got irritating. I’m all for sweeping camera movements, but after ten non-stop minutes, the effect lost its charm. The camera never stays still for longer than about two seconds, giving the film a retarded sense of hyperactivity that burns its energy too quickly. In fact, if you’re reading this Pitof, I’d like to suggest you lose the whole metrosexual one-name thing and just call yourself “Crane Shot.”

Halle’s hair isn’t the only thing Pitof butchers: the editing is probably the worst seen in recent memory. It apparently isn’t enough that the camera can’t stay still, because the cutting of scenes is just as frantic. A simple sequence in which Patience and Alex Borstein chat in a hospital had so many edits that Berry’s facial expression changed about five or six times. Starbuck does make decaf lattes, people.

Now, many of you are probably wondering: why the lengthy history of Comic Book Movies at the top of this review? Well, think about it. It took years (decades, actually) for Spandex Heroes to be taken seriously; and with every bad cash-in that follows, the genre loses credibility. Non-fans are amazed (pun intended) at the quality of something like Spider-Man, and go into Catwoman expecting a similar experience. They leave disappointed. And when the next Comic Book Movie arrives, regardless of its quality, they might not be so eager to see it. Less box office means less films of the type, and less films of the type means more films starring Julia Roberts. This is a bad thing.

This is also bad news for Warner Brothers. After their lengthy hiatus from the genre, during which time most of Marvel’s major properties have either been made into films or are currently in development, they chose to jumpstart their ailing DC titles with Catwoman, which is easily one of the worst Comic Book Movies ever made. An uphill battle is never easy.

I knew enough about the background of this film to write it off as a disaster before I even saw the first trailer; yet I saw it anyway, and for two very simple reasons. One: I’m a comic fan, and it’s almost an obligation. Two: I saw it so you don’t have to. Consider yourself warned.

Now go see Spider-Man 2 again.

0.0 out of 10

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I wrote for a website a few years back, one which has since gone offline. IWith all the DARK KNIGHT hoopla, it made me dig up the review of CATWOMAN and give it a look. Yeah, I certainly spent more words on it than necessary, but what can I say: I loved that movie.