Catwoman, 1/5

I have a bit of an illness when it comes to owning movies and I have to finish what my mind sees as a collection.  Since I own Batman movies, it is a natural extension that I should own Catwoman.  I happened to find myself in a video store that was two hours away from where I live and they had 5 copies of this movie for 6.99 each.  I went up to buy one and the computer, proving that not even the used video store wanted it, rang it up as 4.99.  I paid cash so that it could not be traced back to me, because I’ve heard the stories (and you know it is bad if Amazon is suggesting you buy Catwoman and Elektra together, so as to minimize embarrassment).  According to the urban legends, this is the video that the Ring was based on.

And the stories are all true.  If you watch this movie all the way through, something horrible will happen.  You will be sitting through the end credits and wondering what happened to the last hour and forty minutes.  Then in a desperate attempt to glean some kind of worth out of the DVD you will watch the three deleted scenes, despite saying to yourself, “If that is what they kept, what must they have cut out?”  They cut out a minute of a boss being nice to Catwoman, a minute of making out, and an alternate ending that was slightly more satisfying than the one they left in.  However, they left in the two and a half minutes of shaky camerawork of Halle Berry playing basketball.

Someone decided that a woman in a leather-suit who had an affinity for cats and was a jewel thief was not a good enough selling point, so they completely re-imagined the character.  There was no more Selina Kyle, instead we had Patience Phillips, a meek art director in a beauty supply company that was about to release “Beauline” which reverses the effects of aging.

She finds out that Beauline has terrible side effects and is killed by the boss’s wife’s goons.  Killed.  To death.  Then a cat brings her back to life.  A cat.  Breathes on her.  And brings her back to life.  

She then exhibits basic split personality disorder traits.  And apparently turns CGI.  Which is fine, I suppose because the cats were all CGI.  She returns the cat to its owner where she finds out that she is one of a long line of Catwomen.  Somehow a badass woman who is a jewel thief was pushed aside to try and pawn off the Witchblade plotline.

Blah, blah, blah.  Revenge, revenge, revenge.  Love interest, love interest, love interest.  End of movie.  Thank God.

Beyond the new origin story and plot points, which, try as I might, I can’t understand.  The art team seemed to decide that the audience was blind.  They were throwing poorly CGI’ed buildings and cats and people at us.  Whenever Catwoman had to run across a roof or anything like that, she gained “COMPUTER POWER” which also meant she seemed to lose a couple of joints and became much stiffer.  And her CGI whip could never decide how long it actually was and was conveniently always long enough to do whatever she needed to do. Jessica Hagy just today uploaded a diagram to show exactly what this phenomenon of CGI is like.

On top of this, Halle Berry seems to have never watched a cat move, so when she is trying to be catlike (and is actually on screen), she is moving more like a bird, with these jerky head movements.  And she decided that, since she needs two personalities,  the best choice for the second personality would be the King of Pop.  She is channeling Michael Jackson for the majority of the movie.

And one of the most frustrating things about this is that they had a beauty company that was selling a product that would ruin people if they stopped using, which sounds like, for all you Batman: The Animated Series fans out there, the perfect set up for Clayface as a villain.  Nope.  That would require some thought.  Instead the “villain” is the boss’s wife who has been using the stuff so much she is invulnerable.  Until she is killed in a manner that is still unclear to me.

Benjamin Bratt did okay in this movie.  Alex Borstein was in it and was a nuisance.  Also there was some kind of underlying feminist ideals that were just awkward.  The villain says at one point “I’m used to doing what I’m told, I’m a woman, well no more, I am now taking control,” or something like that and it just rang false.  I agree with feminist ideals, but the movie just tried to pass lip service to it in order to try and make us think that they had a stronger heroine than they actually did.

Overall:  This movie is worse than AVP-R.  Do not watch.  1/5 I hated it.  I detested it.  I loathed it.  I was yelling at the screen through much of the movie.