Oscar winner Halle Berry takes her shot at a summer blockbuster with the female super-hero movie Catwoman as a sensitive, frustrated artist-wannabe Patience Phillips (Berry), that’s right Patience. Not the Selina Kyle you comic book diehards may have expected, this is the new Catwoman and her name is Patience, but my patience is one thing that quickly ran out.
Patience has problems; she lacks self-confidence, and can’t stand up for herself. She has a hard time talking to handsome detectives (Bratt); in fact she can hardly even walk into an office building without falling over. Patience dresses terribly and seems miserable despite her having a great job and beautiful apartment.
She works as a graphic designer who does advertising work for a company called Hardcore Beauty, a cosmetics company with dark secrets and an evil corporate boss (Stone). Her miserable existence is soon brought to a sudden halt once she accidentally stumbles on a terrible side effect in the company’s newest product line. The discovery sends her running for her life, and eventually sleeping with the fishes.
Left for dead, she is found by sacred cats, which bring her back to life and bestow upon her the power of cats! Now, free from her “caged” existence, she can fight back, as Catwoman.
Let’s cut to the chase, this movie is terrible, and the biggest reason why is Halle Berry. At no point does she connect with the audience or make her character compelling or believable. For the majority of the film, Berry relies on doing a very poor cat impression while at the same time trying very hard to look sexy in her ripped leather cat suit.
Throughout the film there is an underlying theme of female empowerment. The problem is that Berry isn’t very good at playing the timid Patience, or the strong Catwoman. So, as an audience we are unable to see the two conflicted sides of her personality, and at the same time experience her transformation into Catwoman.
On top of that, Catwoman not only inherits the useful qualities of a cat, like being able to see in the dark and always landing on her feet, but also the useless qualities like a love for tuna fish and catnip. This could have been a great chance for comedy, but like the rest of the film the opportunity is missed, and instead falls completely flat.
Besides having an all around ill-conceived plot and terrible screenplay, the other reasons for this film not working are its very unlikable cast, including a very typical villain performance by Sharon Stone, whose prime has come and gone along with her only hit.
In fact the only thing this movie has going for it, is the sex-appeal of Halle Berry in a cat suit, so you have to ask yourself, is the promise of a scantily clad Halle Berry enough to make this film a hit, or even worth seeing? No, is the answer if you needed help on this one, this film is one huge “cat”-astrophe.
