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'Catwoman' claws on disaster
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, July 22, 2004
"Why do people need movie reviews to tell them what they already know?" Michael Atkinson wrote in The Village Voice referring to I, Robot. It's worth saying again this week: If Halle Berry in a cat suit crouched on a ledge croaking, "That's perrrrrfect" with all the BIFF! BOP! gusto of '60s Batman and Robin makes you cringe just thinking about it, then you already know what you're missing this Friday at the box office.
Schlock is the rock on which the box office stands and but this first Barbie doll in this summer's comic action theme park is something worse, something without definition maybe. It has me hoping instead for another Charlie's Angel's movie. At least the Angels can fight crime without the help of their boyfriends.
Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is the scatterbrained hot/not-hot rookie designer for a makeup czar George Hedare, (Lambert Wilson stylishly milking his starched French jerk routine as the Merovingian of The Matrix sequels). One late night at the factory she stumbles upon a plan by Hedare's jilted wife (Sharon Stone) to launch a poisonous beauty cream worldwide. Patience is terminated by Hedare's thugs only to be brought back by an ancient Egyptian cat. In her new life she's granted the most dangerous female super-power: confidence (read: sex appeal). The new Patience is a hot-to-trot sexpot with a new 'do and sexy leather duds. She's the proverbial stripper tearing off her dorky school uniform and glasses to show us her...um, independence, I guess.
Special-effects technician-turned-director Pitof must think that the films of the MTV generation aren't fast enough judging by this unrelenting barrage of swooping, spinning, craning shots edited together at 125 miles an hour.
While CG spider-boy glides gracefully articulate through his comic book in New York, Catwoman's action is garbled, pixilated digital spaz. While Pitof was reaching into his bag of tricks for the climactic showdown, I was reaching for an airsickness bag and trying to avoid having a seizure. It was like watching a cat suit in a blender, spinning, tumbling off a rooftop to the beat of bad hip-hop-soul-rock music.
Although style over substance seems to be Catwoman's misguided plea, there's still enough dumfounding rhetoric to count as justification. Catwoman's battle cry for female empowerment sounds more to me like a cry to get freaky on the dance floor-which she does, sadly. And even with her cat-powers, she's outsmarted, captured and then bailed out by her dashing boyfriend Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt). It seems fitting that Berry would be the one to deliver that message, who became the esteemed first best actress of color. This message seems to be confirmed in one of the film's slow-rising crane shots which lingers at Berry's below-the-waist endowment for a really, really long time as if every shot of her swaggering walk should constitute a climax. And who would guess that it ends in a catfight with Stone, a frigid, bloodless beat-down, but a male fantasy none-the-less. Sharon Stone's ironically fitting role: the waning femme fatal of the '90s going homicidal over her lost looks could make an interesting movie, especially because her face is so smooth and wrinkle-free you'd almost guess she's using the movie's fictional miracle cream. And Lambert Wilson takes a couple of amusing misogynistic potshots. "Don't think," he leers at his 20-something mistress, "consider it a condition of our relationship."
You almost wonder if Halle Berry has that same agreement with her agent.
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