Catwoman (2004), by Pitof

Still better than Suicide Squad.

Or, if I can get a do-over: my new favorite episode of the Adam West Batman.

This movie and I have something of a history--I remember when it first came out and when I first began hearing bad reviews about it. In my first-ever issue of Nintendo Power, there was a preview for the GameCube shovelware tie-in that was about four or five pages, all predicated on the idea of the reading audience being heterosexual teen boys. Naturally they played up the sex angle of the movie as much as they could in a magazine officially aimed at kids. And when the game actually game out, they gave it 9/10. It was a mainstream gaming magazine, of course it got 9/10. In the months that passed I saw the folly of their hubris as the movie the video game was based on was torn to shreds by audiences and critics alike--I saw that Nintendo Power writers were as shameless as I am presently, liking everything they consumed without rhyme or reason. I understood a new dimension in the world of media and criticism. That brings us to today.

Catwoman is a colossal mess, but if you, like me, have had thirteen years of preparation for the moment of watching it, you will probably have a good time. It is a bad movie--a very horrible movie, as it happens. It would have been pretty devastating to have realized you paid full ticket price for a theatrical showing of this back in 2004. But in the course of writing the review for this movie I wrote down more bullet points than I ever have before for a single movie, and that's got to stand for something. The trashy moments just kept happening, and then they would cement themselves into trashy themes and trashy running gags, and soon the whole bloody architecture of the movie was nothing but rotting garbage. I haven't had so much fun with a trainwreck of this magnitude since The Room, which this movie weirdly resembles, with its odd fixations on extremely nondescript urban settings and impossibly unlikely conversations.

Patience Phillips is an extremely anxious and reserved artist who believes that she has sold out by taking a job as a graphic designer at Hedare Beauty, a major beauty company which is about to release its age-reversal product Beauline. Despite the fact that her boss, George Hedare, is obviously evil, it takes stumbling onto a covert meeting after hours for Patience to learn of Beauline's dark secret. Prolonged use of the cream creates horrible facial disfigurements which only continued use of the cream will erase--essentially, Hedare intends to make addicts out of his customers. When Patience is discovered she is flushed out of the building's sewage tunnels, which drowns her. However, she is surrounded by a horde of cats, including an Egyptian Mau which she spotted earlier and tried to rescue from climbing up on a precipice. The cats seemingly restore her to life, and when she returns she has the abilities of a cat, including tremendous agility, enhanced senses, and the power to always land on her feet. She doesn't remember what she found when she was killed nor the circumstances of her resurrection, but she soon meets Ophelia Powers, a woman who helps her understand that she is now the Catwoman, inheritor of the powers of the goddess Bastet, and she must avenge all evil. Patience intends to start by avenging her own death.

Now, I mentioned earlier that Patience tried to rescue that Egyptian Mau ("Midnight") from climbing up onto a ledge on the outside of her apartment building. Well, when she was out there risking her neck she attracted a crowd who thought she was trying to kill herself, including a cop with the rather unlikely name of Tom Lone--Lone and Patience have since become an item, though Lone is also after Catwoman, since Catwoman's first start in her quest to avenging her death involved robbing a jewelry store. This is because this has to seemingly relate back to the DC Comics stories that this whole affair is ostensibly adapted from. Once Patience is fully in touch with her role as Catwoman, and remembers the deadly secret of Beauline, she goes on the hunt to find those responsible and shut down their operation. But it may not be George Hedare that Catwoman has to worry about--after all, his wife Laurel has been stalking in the shadows of the film, slipping deeper into the darkness as she rages against her bastard of a husband and fears her own encroaching age.

So as I work my way down my list of bullet points, I see that a lot of the heat of this hot garbage comes from Patience's friend Sally, who has a lot of screentime for some reason. Sally is in this movie, seemingly, to make the movie fail the Bechdel Test so hard it made me remember the Bechdel Test was a thing. EVERY conservation she has with Patience is about men, and what women can do with male bodies. Sally is--to be somewhat impolite--a nymphomaniac. Our introduction to her is her explaining that she used her tits to get an early-release sample of Beauline from the testing plant. Every scene she's in pushes her more and more over the top, and she says some truly offensive shit, including, "You're never allowed to beat the guy at sports," and, I kid you not, "Give him some brown sugar." Yeah, if you didn't know, Patience is played by Halle Berry. The writers simply could not allow a black actress to have the line "Give him some sugar" afforded to her without making it an issue of race. I'll get into a lot of this later, because I have to briefly mention Patience's gay coworker, her only other friend, who is actually pretty lovely, even though he apparently gave her a leather catsuit for her birthday (?).

Aside from sexism and trace amounts of racism, or admittedly-dated (but not atrocious) CGI fight scenes, the movie's main focus is on the comic relief of Halle Berry as a cat. To specify, her first meeting with Ophelia Powers ends with her sniffing catnip and getting high off of it. That's it. She freaks out about the 'nip, and--Scene. Observe ye also the digressions of Halle Berry hissing at dogs, running away from rain, and eating eight cans of tuna in one sitting. It all culminates in a scene where Catwoman goes into a club (whose staff have no qualms about her face-concealing mask, as if the filmmakers think that modern dance clubs are some sort of old-timey aristocratic Grand Ball) and orders "a White Russian, but hold the ice, vodka, and kahlua." So she gets a big glass of cream, geddit? It's like the Bat Credit Card all over again, but on an endless, film-long conga line.

This movie is canon to the Burtonverse, by the way. One of the previous Catwomen shown is Michelle Pfeiffer from Batman Returns. If only Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar had been in that pile of photographs as well, just to fuck with people's heads.

Other bullet-points, too brief to be worth their own paragraphs:

• There's a board meeting at the start of the movie that is scripted really awkwardly. As George Hedare is giving a big speech about Beauline, Laurel interrupts to start talking about herself. I know that sounds like it's meant to be awkward, but it doesn't really come across that way.
• Also, if you can't guess that George is evil the second he opens his mouth, you may not be as good at movies as you think you are.
• Tom has to save Patience when she starts falling off the building, but because of how the continuity is handled, it looks like he runs all the way up from the ground floor to the inside of her apartment in the span of about two seconds. Maybe his real name is Barry Allen.
• You know you're a good screenwriter when you end up with moments like, "Thanks for saving me from falling off a building...OH SHIT, I'M LATE TO WORK. I'll talk to you later, byeee!"
• Don't be alarmed by the awful CGI cats. Be alarmed by the awful CGI seagulls.
• One of Patience's cat-related freakouts is that she is more confident, or open about her feelings, or...moody, or something. So she ends up calling George an idiot and gets herself fired for no reason. I don't know why everyone else didn't end up getting fired, though, because they laugh and cheer at her standing up to him in a manner which he surely has to notice. I guess it's okay to fire just one person for an outburst when your entire staff openly hates you just as bad as that one person does, just as long as she makes her outburst before everyone else gets their chance.
• The basketball scene. You've probably seen it or heard of it. Basically two adults get way, way too sexual in front of a bunch of children, in a little game of "one-on-one." This movie's sexuality is really weird.
• Case in point Patience gets glazed-over fuck-me eyes when she first takes the Catwoman costume out of the box.
• At one point, Patience protests a party being thrown in the building across from hers, which apparently is a regular occurrence as it bothers her a few times throughout the movie. The best insult the partyers can throw at her turns out to be, "Get a life, loser!" Gotta keep that PG-13!
• There is a scene in this film where a handwriting analyst determines "from the spaces between the R's" that the writer (Catwoman) is "lonely, insecure...a people-pleaser." What.

I don't want to spoil too much else. Just know that the movie, being written exclusively by men, is pretty sexist. Bechdel failings aside, the movie makes it obvious that this is meant to be a superhero film fer girlz. The central plot is about beauty cream, for God's sake! Relationships, cats, jewelry, gossip, and Sisterhood™--that's what the ladies like, don't they? Isn't this just like Sex and the City, but with fight scenes and awesome whips?

For its unintentional humor, the movie is not unwatchable, as people have labeled it over the years. It's so weird to look at this and think it was supposed to have something to do with Batman. Despite its failings, the cast does give it their all--I always love seeing Halle Berry in things--and if the movie was made by, y'know, women, it might have something interesting to it. Plus the soundtrack is pretty good in its own way. Catwoman is exceedingly problematic, but it is the 21st Century's best answer yet to The Pumaman. It deserves a fairer turn than it's gotten, but not necessarily for good reasons.

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