Movie Review – Catwoman
Celebrating the Worst Films of All Time, fernbyfilms.com brings you another in the list of possibly the cruddiest movies you’ll ever see…. perhaps, though, you should take our advice and never glance upon these celluloid travesties…. EVER! You have been warned!!!
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Amongst the greatest comic-book movie adaptations ever made, the likes of Superman, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2, and Iron Man all rank pretty high on the list. Catwoman, the movie we’re discussing here, is so completely opposite in quality to the aforementioned, there’s a fair chance you’d barely even call this a film.
Halle Berry plays the title character, a DC Comics anti-hero who dresses up as a cat, and goes about fighting crime, or destroying public property, depending on who you talk to. Originally, the character received some attention in Tim Burtons Batman Returns, opposite Michael Keaton’s Batman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin, to rave reviews. Played in that installment by Michelle Pfeiffer, most people described that portrayal as the definitive version. Berry’s attempt is about as far from the model of the original charcter as you can get. It’s Catwoman in name only folks, and doesn’t rank among the best “films” to come out of the Warner Bros stable.
Directed by the strangely named Pitof (which sounds like some kind of bladder disorder) and edited by what appears to be a washing machine, Catwoman is an assault (and not in a good way) on the senses that has to be seen to be believed. If you didn’t think major film stars were capable of appearing in utter dreck not long after winning an Oscar, then this is the film for you. Sharon Stone destroys any semblance of a career by showing up as the chief bad girl, her snarling, prowling performance simply laughable.
Logic, in this film, doesn’t not exist. Neither do the laws of physics, as Berry’s Catwoman jumps, leaps and darts around the various sets with all the CGI style of the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns. Awful dialogue and a complete lack of film narrative make this jumble of schizophrenic storytelling a compete and utter waste of time. There’s not enough skin shown to warrant this film even as a cheap nasty perv!
Catwoman is as far removed from superhero films, as The Remains Of The Day is from science fiction. Absolutely diabolical.
Who wrote this?
I think this film is such a great example of throwing a popular actor 'of the moment' into a poorly written, shabbily conceptualized comic book adaptation. I also think you're right about the post Oscar buzz phenomenon that has caught up more than one or two hapless stars who do their best (or their handlers do their best) to capitalize on mainstream attention. I think it has worked for Shia LeBouf with his string of one film after the other, but he does possess some talent beyond the robot and Indiana Jones flicks. And yes, sadly, Sharon Stone has become a caricature of herself slowly, steadily since Basic Instinct. I tried to sit through Barry Levinson's Sphere the other day during research for the article I wrote on him and it was painful to say the least. Stone was empty, stumbling through bad lines and even worse plot.
Good call.
Sphere's another contender for a future Worst FIlm Week entry, I think. Ugh, what a shoddy film that was.