This is a movie I have put off rewatching for years. It’s like running into an ex you know will only bring up negative feelings. Catwoman embodies that awkward stage comic book movies were going through around 2004 while studios were still testing boundaries and attempting to figure the genre out. They had been trying to get this character’s solo career started since 1993 and were forced to finish the project to replace a Batman vs. Superman film that had failed to materialize. After multiple writers, a somewhat new director, and a ton of studio meddling, DC Comics fans would be offered up this helping of soured milk.
“It all started on the day that I died.”
Let’s forget everything we’ve ever learned about the character of Catwoman from the books, we won’t need any of that here. Instead of our dear Selina Kyle, we’re following Patience Philips, a graphic designer who lets people walk all over her and puts up with way more shit than she should. Her boss trashes her work, talks down to her, and Patience’s determination to please him causes her to stumble onto a dangerous new product that could seriously hurt consumers or force them to be lifelong customers. Upon being discovered, the young artist is disposed of, but thankfully she saved a cat earlier who comes back to breathe new life into her corpse. Now she’s tied to some Egyptian cat mythology and has super-human athletic abilities – and became a pretty good thief too somehow – all so she can get revenge on those who murdered her and protect others, but can she do it while also dating a sexy new cop boyfriend?
The lore in this film annoys me in the stupidest ways because it focuses so much on the ‘cat’ aspect of the character and decides to not only give her powers with that but a second personality where the main character doesn’t always seem in control or forgets she did specific things. It isn’t explored enough to be meaningful and comes up too much to ignore, along with other cat-like behaviors. She drinks straight milk at the club, obsesses over catnip, hisses at dogs, hates getting wet, and eats sushi the same way my wife does, but her worst offense is the cat-based puns. I’d ask if, since she’s doing everything like a cat, she makes love like one too, but we see her boyfriend’s back after the sex scene. Catwoman uses a whip for several reasons, one of which is because it mimics a tail to help complete the animal aesthetic, but with how this movie handles its main character, I’m shocked they didn’t have her just express that out loud for the audience.
The director, Pitof (Jean-Christophe Comar), wanted Catwoman’s physical nature to pop off of the screen and be realistic (with a little CGI help), and according to choreographer Anne Fletcher, “He said that she’s a woman first and a cat second, but he wanted to see how cat-like a human body could become.” Patience’s physicality is the main attraction, and it kind of complicates any substance the film might have had. Though this was an attempt to push female-led superhero films, her sexuality was still pushed to the forefront in many common ways, and as stated by one academic paper, “The film presents her agency, power, and freedom as derivative of her hypersexualization,” this led to that sex appeal being the focus instead of a part of her. We all saw how great she looked on that motorcycle. The costumes added to this as well, ever-changing and attempting to show a growth in her confidence, but perhaps also sending the wrong message.
I don’t think we can blame too much of this on Halle Berry. I doubt anyone could make some of these lines work. She has a history of giving 100% for several roles and dedicating herself to training – Capoeira and wielding the whip in this case – even going as far as doing some of her own stunts for this film, working with a choreographer to learn to be more cat-like, spending time with animal handlers, and watching tons of cat videos. No, that last one isn’t a joke.
Berry didn’t even abandon the film after it was revealed to be a huge flop. She adopted one of the cats from the shelter they had used for the movie, famously went in person to accept her Razzie award for the critically panned feature, and has even shown interest in directing a future Catwoman project. She has publicly thanked fans who have stood by the movie and as younger audiences discover it, there seems to be a small but passionate following for this box office disaster. Over the years, Berry has received most of the hate for Catwoman, as she was the high-profile starlet all over the posters, but the actress has shouldered that masterfully while reminding us that she wasn’t the only one to blame.
This cast has some fun names in it, like how her best friend, Sally (Alex Borstein), is Lois Griffin from Family Guy, or that the doctor they kill, Ivan Slavicky (Peter Wingfield), was Methos in the Highlander TV show, and I can’t un-see George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) as anyone other than the Merovingian. There are others, but people tend to remember that Sharon Stone plays our true main antagonist here, Laurel Hedare, a twist that almost works in the film. Stone isn’t doing a poor job with the role, just not working with great material and some stories of her conduct on set make it sound like she checked out at some point. No, there’s one person that I (unfairly, I imagine) blame here.
I’ve been trying to figure out if Benjamin Bratt (Law & Order, Traffic) is sexy or not, good leading man material — my wife said no, so I’m trusting her on this. Here he plays Detective Tom Lone, and he is quite the cool loner, helping women from falling off ledges, climbing down a Ferris wheel, and doing real police work like comparing handwriting samples and lip imprints to make sure his new squeeze isn’t a killer, but even with all of that, my biggest issue is that he isn’t that useful to the film. It would be so easy to take him out of the movie and cut it down or give that extra time to other aspects of Patience’s life. It looks like he’s going to be useful at the end, but then he just almost gets himself killed.
So, if our actors are mostly off the hook for this being a bad movie, where does the blame go? We can start with the director. Pitof was known as a visual effects supervisor who, at the time, only had one feature film on his resume, and Catwoman didn’t help him add too many after that. He was thought to have a good sense of style for the big screen, but for this at least, that style was just cat, and many of his editing choices felt like they were still taking influence from ‘90s music videos. There are unnecessary distracting cuts at some points while the same person is talking, as well as odd camera angles and effects shots used to show the character’s movement during action scenes that are frankly jarring. Many of the scenes are either too much or nothing at all, with the only memorable one to me being the skyscraper fading into Ophelia’s (Frances Conroy) house. The final fight scene reportedly took nine days to film and though it isn’t the worst I’ve seen by far, the editing hurts any drama involved and leaves it feeling hollow and weightless. There’s also the matter of the vastly computer-generated city and though they mostly used real cats, the times they have to rely on CGI animals are quite noticeable.
Some of the green screen and other effects were due to forced reshoots. They were working on those shots up until a month before the film’s release and even retooling the story while they were in the editing booth. The director said there were rewrites for the film throughout the entire process, until the very last minute. There were numerous writers on this project, four listed but another was apparently approached, and when the final one was brought in, his treatment was dropped in favor of a mix from the previous two, resulting in a mismatched story made messier by studio interference and mandates. One writer, Jon Rogers, said that, “it was a shit movie dumped by the studio at the end of a style cycle, and had zero cultural relevance either in front of or behind the camera.”
It wasn’t always that way. Though Batman Forever was heading to a more family-friendly presentation, the original idea for Catwoman was something more closely tied to Tim Burton’s depiction, and darker. The only remnant of that in this movie, though, is a picture of Michelle Pfeiffer’s version of the character on the floor. After Pfeiffer abandoned the project in the ‘90s, Ashley Judd was considered, but she passed, as did Nicole Kidman, leaving the perspective film in limbo until Halle Berry showed interest. But even when this new version was first being considered, one of the drafts was more serious and a little closer to the comics, but WB just didn’t think it would work.
According to producer Denise Di Novi the original idea when they committed to making it was a smaller project without the big-name star, a gritty origin story around a more grounded concept. When other DC movies failed to be greenlit, though, Catwoman got pushed up in a lot of different ways. This also meant that the rules changed, the biggest one being that they couldn’t mention Batman at all. Pre-production was forced to move rapidly and there was more pressure now to represent the brand, but without the ability to use the parts fans wanted.
There were also marketing issues as well. The original photos of Berry in an early version of the Catwoman outfit were met with disgust online. Although some people do appreciate Berry’s costumes and look in the movie, this first impression soured many on the character. There were other marketing plans, like a Catwoman Barbie and an animated feature that would have tied in loosely, but these things were all canceled once WB realized what they had on their hands.
It’s sad that Berry and some others who worked on the film really wanted to make something good, but it sounds like they should have never been making a Catwoman story. Under different hands, without the studio, things could have been different, but as it stands now, there’s no telling how many lives this tragedy took off an incredible character.
At least it’s better than Batman & Robin — nope. No, I don’t even think I can say that.
