Movie of the week: “Catwoman”. SPOILERS!

I would really like to say something positive about this movie, but “Catwoman” makes that really hard. It’s not that it’s really bad, it’s just cheesy but on a too high level to be campy fun. The ingredients for a good movie are there: a beautiful heroine caught between her feelings and the law, a sinister corporate group and a dark secret. However, something went wrong in the process of mixing all of these, and thus “Catwoman” is merely a lukewarm conglomerate of the aforementioned plot devices.

The beautiful heroine is laughably bad at being bad: there is not much difference to the overly shy person from before (she even apologizes for robbing a jeweler!) and sometimes she’s just plain stupid – obviously donning a hot leather outfit kills brain cells very quickly. Her affair with good cop Tom (Benjamin Bratt) is only believable because Halle Berry has a decent chemistry with Bratt, and not because it would be terribly convincing plot wise. The sinister corporate group would be so much more sinister if it were for something really threatening, but it’s about beauty products. Un-hu, tell me again how that destroys the earth?

And if you plant a character just to make that point, then make it and don’t throw it away! Sally is that character, but apart from drooling over Tom and having the hotties for her cute doctor, does she do something, like suffer from the effects of the deadly beauty cream? Oh, she has a headache, how devilishly evil!

Back to script school to learn how to make emotional involvement believable, and while you’re there, look again at how to incorporate a good villain because Laurel Hedare – I don’t think so. Sharon Stone tries to make her bad, really bad, but it takes more than a golf club to kick some ass. What she gets right, however, is the animal attraction (pardon the pun) between Laurel and Catwoman, even though I had to cringe at her bedroom voice when she calls Patience on her own phone (like I said, Catwoman seems to have lost the odd brain cell on the way).

The final fight is pointless banter with waging favors, the marble skin explanation so sleazy I thought at first she was making a joke – but no, she meant it! And her tragic end wasn’t tragic but weird. So the cream wore off? Or did Catwoman just scratch the marble skin away? Did the writer waste as many thoughts on this as I did? Not likely.

Halle Berry is too apologetic as Patience and too unnervingly playful as Catwoman but she looks definitely hot in that skimpy leather outfit of hers. Lambert Wilson leaves a good impression as thoroughly unsympathetic boss, however he gets killed off too soon. The music is okay if not spectacular, the cinematography tries and sometimes also succeeds at not only being hyper modern but also presenting nice images, and now let’s forget about the pleasantries and talk about the computer animations.

Oh boy. Especially after seeing “I, Robot” just last week let me repeat that: Oh boy. Rarely have I seen a movie with a budget this size ($85 Mio) fail so miserably at offering CGI. Everytime a fake cat appaears on the screen, it’s painfully obvious, and they appear a lot. Catwoman’s strolls over the roofs of the city are cleverly shot at night because in broad daylight, it would really suck. Not that it would look good this way because even a blind man could see it’s not Halle Berry who jumps over fences twice her size. I felt reminded of “Birds of prey” where the effects were of similar ‘quality’ but hello, that was a TV show on a weekly basis, and don’t tell me they couldn’t get any decent effects in “Catwoman” for so much money?

Apparently not, which is a shame because good special effects can make a movie so much more worthwhile – see “Spiderman” for reference. In fact, if you want to see a comic book turned into a movie that’s entertaining, intelligent fun, go watch Peter Park swing through the air. If you can live without a cohesive plot, sympathetic characters and a convincing villain and are just interested in some Halle Berry booty in leather, go watch Patience fall from a shelf. It’s your choice.
2 out of 6 Meeps – disappointing.