Trailer:
“Cat got your tongue?”
Compared to the onrush of Marvel Films, DC had been taking a backseat up to this point. In fact their last film was Steel in 1998, unless you count League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Road to Perdition. But I’m not really talking about the graphic novels here. Steel was so bad that it even wrecked the entire DC libraries chances of making it on screen. Yet no matter how bad Batman and Robin or Steel were, nothing compared to the horror that Catwoman was ready to unleash.
Halley Barry had apparently had enough playing a supporting character in a superhero film and was ready to step in and take the lead as the first (and as of yet the only) solo female superhero. She did such a good job with the roll that she won a razzie for it. Please note that as sarcasm. That razzie was for Worst Actress. Halley Barry might have done a decent job as Storm but here she is horrible. She plays the roll painfully over the top and her character makes no coherent sense.
So what is the story? After a lame opening on the history of multiple catwomen throughout history, the film opens to a horrifically bad CGI city that looks like a crappy autodesk pre-rendering. There we meet Patience, an artist working at an advertising section of a beauty company. Gone is Salina Kyle, replaced with this stale, boring excuse of a character who only rips off aspects of the better known alias.
One nigh Patience goes to a warehouse to find her order of new designs when she witnesses the main villain, Laurel Hadare plotting to release an “addictive” new beauty product that is supposed to reverse aging. What isn’t on the bottle is that if the user stops using it, they become horribly scarred….no not die….just ugly. Ah, I can feel the tension in this film rising already!
Simple fact. There is something very wrong with a script when the main villain is a beauty product manufacturer/Model. If that were not stupid enough, let’s talk about Hadare’s fearsome powers. Apparently this addictive cream also has a secondary side effect of making the users skin as “hard as marble.” So what do we call this woman. Rock Face? Marble Mouth? The Demon of Cream? No, that last one actually sounded a little impressive. That wouldn’t work. She is pretty much indestructible….AND stupid.
Back to the plot, when Patience finds out about this she is flushed down the sewage pipes and falls to her death. That is when she is found by the magic mystical Egyptian cats. Now these catastrophes of CGI burp into Berry’s face and give her the power to also turn into CGI. I think the makers intended for her to get cat powers but whose paying attention at this point.
Patience then gets this weird kind of split personality as the movie falls into cat puns and Berry doing cat related actions in the attempt of appearing clever. By day she is dull artist but by night she is a superhero/thief who dresses up like a stripper. Here is where the problem with the film—well one of the many— develops. The movie keeps telling the audience that Catwoman is an antihero but she never does anything villainous. In fact whenever she steals something she guiltily returns it the next morning….with cupcakes. Yeah, that’s a real morally grey character right there.
But if you think the main characters are bad they don’t begin to compete with the supporting ones. Berry’s character has got a friend in the film named Sally who serves no other job than being a source of so-called comedic relief but the only relief I got was in the moment I thought she died. Unfortunately she is alive again in the following scene. In all seriousness though, there hasn’t been anything less funny since the Hindenburg went up in flames. Her part in the film makes it feel like a really, really bad chick flick.
Then there is the main love interest, Detective Tom Lane who chases Catwoman around and is too stupid to notice who she obviously is. Do you remember that silly playground scene from Daredevil? This on has got it topped in a basketball face off between Lane and Catwoman while all the elementary school kids watch them practically makes out on the basketball court. He doesn’t really add as much to the story as a character like him should. Wait, what I’m I saying, there is NO story here worth reinforcing anyways.
Then there is the music, which sounds like someone is prodding a diva with a stick. It’s just long obnoxious moaning that only stops every now and then to add some of the latest pop songs and a score that sounds like it belongs in the Lion King. It’s enough to make your ears bleed by the end of the film.
And that is Catwoman, the first solo female superhero film and this is what happens. We get the director Pitoff (does this guy think he is a rapper?) turning her into a stripper and clown. The only pluses in the film are Halley Barry’s midriff and the fact it isn’t boring. Just really, really, really, unbelievably dumb. This is not just the worst superhero movie ever made, but is up there with some of the worst films of all time.
FINAL RATING: 0/10- (0%)
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