CATWOMAN

Rating: 1

Cheese on the silver screen can be a lot of fun in a kitschy sort of way. CATWOMAN, on the other hand, is cheesy in the cheese that you find in the back of your refrigerator way, the cheese that’s been there a really, really long time. So long, in fact, that it’s developed its own eco-system and not a friendly one. Halle Berry, who we must remind ourselves, won an Oscar© a few years back and rightly so for MONSTER’S BALL, is Catwoman, which if not the low point of her career, will certainly weigh in at below sea-level when the final accounting is made.
When the film opens, she is simple and fully dressed Patience Phillips, talented artist and life’s doormat. Dare one call her mousey? She works designing ads for a cosmetic company’s brand of “hope in a jar” that might actually be just that. Beau-line doesn’t just claim to reverse the aging process, it really does. And, as with all things too good to be true, there’s a catch that starts with headaches and nausea and ends with something more at home in a Frankenstein flick. When our gal Patience stumbles across this dark side of vanity, she’s offed by the evil head of the company (Lambert Wilson), but not for long. A sacred Mau cat, emissary of the Egyptian goddess Bast, stares into Patience’s dead eyes and breathes on her. The next thing Patience knows, she’s home with no memory of what happened to her, unnaturally acute agility, a penchant for walking on the backs of sofas, and a monumental hankering for tuna. There’s also the aggressive new personality, the spiky new hair-do, and the penchant for leather, all the better to start her new career as a crime fighter and occasional jewel thief.
It all gets sillier and sillier as the film progresses with a plot that seems like it’s made up as it goes along. There’s the love interest, of course, in the person of wholesomely smoldering Benjamin Bratt, who just happens to be the cop assigned to investigate the robberies and murders of which Catwoman stands accused. That he is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier only helps to prolong the agony into a two-hour running time, which seems so much longer what with dialogue that ranges from painfully clumsy exposition to painfully forgettable banality. There’s Frances Conroy in too much eyeliner as the ex-professor and full-fledged cat lady who explains to Patience what’s happened to her. There’s the cliché man-hungry fat girlfriend and the other cliché, the man-hungry gay friend. And then there’s Sharon Stone, who enters the Norma Desmond hall of fame with her overblown portrayal of an aging model whose husband, that evil corporate head, is throwing her over for a younger trophy wife. The director, who goes by one name, Pitof, seems to have conceived the film as a soft-core porn shoot for a less than chic European fashion magazine. Berry, bodacious bod on constant display in a variety of odd contortions, moves as though she were choreographed by a low-rent version of Bob Fosse, which wouldn’t work even in a musical. She bobs, she weaves, she makes purring noises and even when wearing tight leather with extreme prejudice, she never quite achieves a feline sultriness.
Now, any film that wants to dwell on the seamy underside of the cosmetics industry and the way it plays its customers for suckers is a film that I want to get behind. I want you to know that I looked very, very hard at CATWOMAN, but I couldn’t find even one redeeming quality beyond that.