Bad Movie Club: Catwoman

2004 superheroine flop

Bad Movie Rating: 2/5 (Josh: 3/5; Johnny: 0/5)

Rating: 3/20

Plot: The story of how Catwoman became Catwoman and fought one of comics' greatest villains--Sharon Stone.

I can't remember a movie flopping this hard during my lifetime as a movie watcher. This is the second time I've watched this, for some reason, and it's an example of a movie that manages to get everything wrong, utterly and hilariously wrong.

The CGI, for both 2004 and 1967, is embarrassing.

The puns manage to neither be kitschy or witty. They are puns that exist because the writers of this drivel felt that having puns was necessary in a comic book superhero movie.

Halle Barry's career-wrecking performance is probably not entirely her fault. And I'm sure Sharon Stone's sleepy performance has more to do with whatever drugs she was on at the time. Nobody has anything to work with with this abysmal screenplay, and it's likely that director Pitof made them stretch out all their lines, especially since that's the sort of thing a director who goes by one name would do.

Speaking of Pitof, he's credited with visual effects on both City of Lost Children and Delicatessen, two movies I absolutely love. Now that I know that, some of the visuals in this do sort of make sense. It doesn't mean that this movie ever has an appropriate tone. It somehow feels comic bookish without ever getting the comic book tone right.

This movie gets sexy all wrong. Halle Barry's forced to strut her stuff in what appears to be bondage gear, showing about twice as much skin as any Catwoman who has came before or after. I can't even tell if Sharon Stone was supposed to have sex appeal or not. I kept expecting her character to flash vagina, but it unfortunately didn't happen.

Speaking of the bondage motif, Catwoman's whip confused me. I'm pretty sure Catwoman is supposed to have a whip, but I think she only has one in a single scene. It's like Halle Berry was too busy working on her sexy kitty voice and walk guaranteed to force sweaty geeks worldwide to salivate and objectify and didn't have enough time to train with the whip so that she didn't accidentally knock one of her beautiful eyes out and ruin her acting career.

As if this movie didn't, sadly, have that exact same effect.

As expected, this ends up with a big fight between our titular protagonist and her arch-nemesis--a cat fight. That pun is better than any of the writing in this movie, so I'm not listening to any of your criticism. But that big climactic fight is between Catwoman, a character who has made complete fools of everybody else she's encountered, and Sharon Stone. Now, I think I misunderstood some of the movie's plot. It's entirely possible that some cream she was using gave her super powers of some kind, but it still looked really dopey.

The romantic subplot, because every heroine needs a man, isn't necessary or convincing.

The pace kind of thunks along, ostensibly for character development, but once the scenes that wallop you like a hammer to the grill come along, you discover that you still don't really give a damn about any of the characters.

This movie not only fails; it fails spectacularly. And after watching it twice and spending this time writing about it, I feel that I've wasted enough time with the thing.