Check Out the Trailer
The film is a poorly executed foray down the clichéd road of superhero revenge tales. Patience Phillips (Halle Berry, MONSTER’S BALL) is a klutzy graphic designer for a huge cosmetics firm. She will be fired by her tyrannical boss George Hedare (Lambert Wilson, THE MATRIX RELOADED) unless she redesigns her campaign within 48 hours.
On the way to deliver her new designs, she overhears George’s maniacal wife Laurel (Sharon Stone, BASIC INSTINCT) talking about the deadly effects of the new beauty product the company is about to launch. Subsequently, Patience is killed and then is brought back to life by some cats, giving her superhuman powers and making her the next in line of free-spirited catwomen.
The theme is empowerment, but it pussy foots around the cat burglar side of the Catwoman character with a lame excuse that she can’t help it. Oh come on. In a quick swoop they transform a three-dimensional woman into some caricature that plays like an insane person living out a dominatrix fetish. The Catwoman costume is a joke. It’s only T&A for the PG-13 crowd.
Once, Patience embraces her bad girl side, she sets out to find the people who killed her and why. Because we know the answers already, her pursuit is filled with zero tension and lame cat puns. When grabbing a bad guys tongue, I’ll give you one guess what terrible line Berry is forced to deliver.
As for Berry’s performance, she is fine as the shy and clumsy Patience, but as Catwoman she delivers bad lines with pain inducing pseudo-sexiness. It’s so forced you feel them cramming it down your eye-sockets. But more dreadful than Berry is Stone’s over-the-top performance, which makes you want to strangle her, but not because she’s such a villain. The love story between Patience and cop Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt, MISS CONGENIALITY) is one cliché after another. Bratt dials in his performance as well. Patience also has a comic relief friend named Sally (Alex Borstein, SEEING OTHER PEOPLE), who gets sick by using the faulty beauty product. I wish she would have died from the stuff then the film would have had some tension to it and we’d be spared the ridiculous “let’s have a white girl say hip-hop dialogue because that’s funny.” Ugh!
So the story stunk, the dialogue is atrocious and the performances are annoying. Maybe the action is good? Wrong. This film has the worst visual effects I’ve seen in a major release in ages. The shots of the cityscape are especially bad, but don’t forget the awfully jumpy character animation of Catwoman. Nothing about this film works. It stinks worse than an uncleaned litter box.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
