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| Catwoman (Halle Berry) prepares to take revenge on the villains who murdered her. |
Release Date: July 19, 2004. Running Time: 104 minutes. Screenplay: John Brancato, Michael Ferris, John Rogers. Story: Theresa Rebeck, John Brancato, Michael Ferris. Producers: Denise Di Novi, Edward L. McDonnell. Director: Pitof.
THE PLOT:
Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a talented young artist working in the advertising department at Hedare Beauty. Hedare is soon to ship a new skin cream, Beau-Line, with company owner George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) and his wife, aging model Laurel (Sharon Stone), touting it as able to reverse the effects of aging.
Beau-Line, however, has side effects. It's addictive, and its caustic properties will destroy the face of any long-term user who stops using it. While she's dropping off her latest designs, Patience has the misfortune to overhear company scientist Slavicky (Peter Wingfield) telling Laurel all about it. Laurel responds by ordering her guards to kill Patience, which they do by flushing the drain pipe in which she's hiding.
That should be the end of Patience's story... except that she previously befriended a cat, an Egyptian Mau named Midnight who has the power of Egypt Voodoo to bring her back to life. Now Patience has cat-like reflexes and instincts and can see in the dark. After a (too) brief period of adjustment, she leans into her new nature, adopting the persona of "Catwoman" and setting her sights on bringing down the company that killed her.
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| Villains George and Laurel Hedare (Lambert Wilson, Sharon Stone). At least they embrace the camp. |
CHARACTERS:
Patience Phillips/Catwoman: Halle Berry won a Worst Actress Razzie, which she famously accepted in person while poking fun at her own emotional Oscar speech from two years earlier. She really didn't deserve the Razzie. Her performance isn't particularly good, and I truly don't believe in her exaggerated meekness in the first twenty minutes. It is baseline competent, however, which is probably the best that anyone could have done with this part as written.
Laurel Hedare: A sign of the oddness of this script is that it plays as if Laurel's villainy is meant to be a twist. Her introductory scene paints her as more sympathetic than her husband, while George's every scene shows him as a man with zero redeeming qualities. Later, she plays innocent for Catwoman, even promising to dig up evidence to bring down George, and her double-cross is presented as if it's meant to be a surprise. Except for one thing - Less than twenty minutes in, we see her dismissing Slavicky's concerns about the Evil Face Cream ("Holy Beauty Products, Batman!") and then ordering Patience's death! My best guess is that bits of different drafts were pasted together without anyone paying attention to if the dramatic beats actually made any sense.
Det. Tom Lone: The hilariously named cop assigned to the Catwoman case, and per Hollywood regulations, Patience's love interest. As an actor, Benjamin Bratt has usually ranged from serviceable to good, but he's truly awful in this role. His detective is unburdened by either charisma or facial expressions, and his chemistry with Patience wouldn't earn a passing grade in a high school science class. Bratt mostly looks bored, and most of Halle Berry's worst acting comes in her scenes opposite him. Since his character does almost nothing to advance the plot, and the romance doesn't illuminate anything about either character, I think they should have just jettisoned Detective Tom Lone entirely.
George Hedare: I'm going to recycle an observation I made about James Woods's performance in my review of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within: Lambert Wilson's acting amounts to an extended cartoon sneer. George is a miserable excuse for a man. He's domineering to his employees and psychologically cruel to his wife. He cheats with a much younger woman; and when attending a dreadful arty event with her that she (accurately) says she thinks is a "waste of time," he snaps: "Don't... think. Ever. Consider it a condition of our relationship."
Ophelia Powers: Patience gets support from the mysterious Ophelia (Frances Conroy), who reveals what has happened to her long after it should already be painfully obvious, and who drops some exposition about catwomen that makes clear that Patience is just one of multiple such women. So comic book purists can rest secure in the knowledge that Selina Kyle is still out there somewhere; there's even a blink-and-you'll-miss-it photo of Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. Ophelia urges Patience to embrace her new nature and "be free." Which involves donning an S & M outfit, because nothing says "female empowerment" like jutting your barely-concealed assets straight at the camera.
Sally: Patience's best friend (Alex Borstein), whose entire role basically amounts to lusting after men. Her Beau-Line use seems like a clear setup, particularly when she is hospitalized. I expected her to develop the side effects that were established early on. Instead, all that happens is that Sally takes the opportunity of hospitalization to relentlessly hit on her doctor in a way that's meant to be funny but mainly comes across as creepy.
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| Patience learns about Catwomen. Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman pictured, presumably as a reminder that it's entirely possible to tell this type of story well. |
"SAY SOMETHING NICE":
A few scenes see Patience slipping in and out of her Catwoman persona, almost as if her personal identity is separate from her new alter ego. When she first goes out as Catwoman, she interrupts a burglary, then steals the jewels herself - only to be appalled at the theft before anonymously returning (most of) the jewels the next day with a note that says, "Sorry." The script never actually makes anything out of the divide between "Patience" and "Catwoman," but these moments hint at it as a concept. Maybe it formed part of an earlier draft, before the script was bludgeoned into the most generic form possible.
"SO... WHAT WERE THEY ON?"
Catwoman follows the "more is more" school of film editing. Even expositional scenes often feature multiple pointless cuts, sometimes between ridiculously similar camera angles, and this tendency gets worse during action sequences. The worst offender is an impromptu basketball game between Patience and Tom. This bit of "action flirting" appears to be borrowed from the laughable playground fight/flirt between Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner in Daredevil. The editing is hyperkinetic, and some shots even switch up the camera lens to add further visual distortion. The Daredevil scene was bad, sure - but at least you could actually see what was happening on screen in that film!
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| Patience flirts with Detective Lone (Benjamin Bratt) on a basketball court. Frenetic editing makes this scene almost impossible to actually watch. |
THOUGHTS:
Catwoman is a very bad movie. It's stupid. The cast struggles gamely against what they're given - but what they're given are cardboard characters spouting dreadful dialogue. Action scenes are terrible and ludicrously overedited, meaning that what should be the saving grace of a film of this genre is arguably the worst part of it.
Patience is a poor investigator. She has to be led by the nose to every discovery. She only knows that anything is wrong with Hedare because she happens to overhear a conversation by accident. When she breaks into the Hedare residence, she's easily manipulated by Laurel, and Laurel's villain monologue is what tells her where to go to stop the distribution of the Evil Face Cream. If we're meant to see her as capable, let alone some kind of symbol of femal empowerment, then shouldn't she actually find out anything thanks to her own resourcefulness?
All of this said, I did have a bit of fun watching this. Most of the 2000s Razzie winners have been dreary, joyless trudges. Catwoman feels like a throwback to the Worst Pictures of the '80s and '90s, many of which were enjoyable in a cheesy sort of way. I laughed at the horrible dialogue and rolled my eyes at the clichés, but I also genuinely wanted to keep watching if only to hear the delivery of the next leaden gem. Also, whatever else can be said, this movie has energy. Sure, it's the energy of a toddler running around incoherently before face-planting on the carpet - but after the likes of Freddy Got Fingered and Gigli, I'll take it!
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| Ophelia Powers (Frances Conroy) breaks out her Big Book of Exposition. Because Patience can figure out literally nothing without someone else telling it to her. |
THE OTHER NOMINEES:
Alexander: Oliver Stone's bloated epic about the life of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell with a bad dye job). Director Oliver Stone clearly made a legitimate effort. He then kept on making it, tinkering even more with this than Coppola did with Apocalypse Now. There are four versions: The 175-minute theatrical cut; the shorter 167-minute director's cut; the 214-minute "Final Cut" that was the real director's cut, honest; and the 207-minute "Ultimate Cut" that is absolutely, positively the one true director's cut. I'll probably watch one of these versions eventually, if only out of curiosity.
Superbabies - Baby Geniuses 2: Out of the nominees, I'd guess that this was the one that actually deserved Worst Picture. By repute, it's even worse than the first Baby Geniuses, which is quite an accomplishment. Sadly, this was the final movie directed by Bob Clark, who in better times had helmed Murder by Decree and A Christmas Story.
Surviving Christmas: Ben Affleck wants to take a vacation over Christmas rather than spending the holiday with family. The horror! I'd wonder if they were copying similarly unfunny Tim Allen starrer Christmas with the Kranks, except both films were released in the same year. Remarkably, this is the worse of the two. At least Kranks's Tim Allen has comic timing, even when he isn't given anything funny to say or do.
White Chicks: Directed by Keenan Ivory Wayans, this film presents Shawn and Marlon Wayons as black, male FBI agents who go undercover as white women. Rather than, you know, sending two female agents. I haven't seen it, but it sounds even stupider than Evil Face Cream, and not in a good way. I'm happy it didn't "win," since I suspect I had a better time with Catwoman than I would have with White Chicks.
OVERALL:
I can't defend Catwoman, which is every bit as bad as its reputation and further suffers from horribly over-edited action scenes. It's a terrible movie, and I wouldn't recommend wasting time with it... unless you're looking for something campy and stupid to make fun of, in which case it might just fit the bill.
Rating: Turkey. For what it's worth, I'd put it at the upper end of that rating.
Worst Picture - 2003: Gigli
Worst Picture - 2005: Dirty Love (not yet reviewed)
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