Catwoman Review
by Martin Phipps (phippsmartin AT hotmail DOT com)August 10th, 2004
Grade: ** out of ****
This review contains spoilers.
A movie needs two things above all else: a good begining and a good ending. A movie needs a good begining because you have just paid to be there and you are expected to watch it for two hours. You don't want the audience members to be sitting there thinking "Oh no, what have I done? Can I slip out of here and go see Spiderman II instead?" A movie also needs a good ending. Without a good ending, movie goers will feel cheated and they definitely would not recommend a movie to their friends if they feel cheated.
Catwoman fails on both ends. It starts with a meeting at Hedare Beauty with Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone) and George Hedare (Lambert Wilson). Why this scene had to be shot like a music video with split second cuts between Sharon and Lambert and even to the board members and then back to Sharon and Lambert I honestly don't know. I remember thinking, as I watched that scene, "So this is why people hate this movie so much! The editting is really bad!" Maybe if the movie had been sent back and re-editted from the original footage then it would have been a better movie.
Thing is, the ending was bad too. Catwoman (Helle Berry) said "I'm not a killer," but this was immediately after kicking Laurel Hedare out of the window. Yes, it was in self defense but what cop after seeing this happens tells her to run away so that nobody knows that Patience Phillips is Catwoman? Doesn't that make him an accessory after the fact? Couldn't he have testified in court that it was self defense? What goes into his official report? That she slipped and fell? Or that Catwoman killed her and got away but that he doesn't know who Catwoman is? How far is he willing to go to cover up for this woman who he slept with? Surely the department knew he had slept with the prime suspect in a murder case. Why wasn't he taken off the case as soon as the possibility conflict of interest reared its head?
The movie had its moments. The comment early in the movie about Patience Phillips having been given a leather outfit as a present was good foreshadowing and we did get to see that outfit later. But then the Catwoman outfit that we see in the rest of the movie is different. Couldn't we have had a scene where Patience, like Selina Kyle before her, cuts up her old outfit and sews it back together, turning a sexy outfit into a sexy costume?
Ultimately, why did she even need the costume? That was never explained.
Actually, the costume didn't work for me. Yes, we got to see Halle Berry's skin but a lot of the time it wasn't Halle Berry we saw in costume, it was all CGI. This aspect of the movie disappointed me more than anything else: if I wanted a sexy cartoon, I could have rented Japanese animation. I thought the whole point of the costume was that we could see Halle Berry's skin, not a computer generated character's skin. It would have been much better to have given her a full body costume and then it wouldn't have been so obvious when she was being rendered by CGI. It's clear from the way this movie was promoted in the trailers that the target audience was heterosexual males, not young kids, so why spend so much money on CGI anyway?
Even the cats were CGI most of the time! Would it have been so hard to train a real cat to crawl up onto Halle Berry and then have her wake up on cue? We know that this is only a movie so why remind us of this fact all the time by showing us CGI like this? Another example is the use of CGI in establishing shots: would it have been so hard to have used a helicopter to shoot footage of an actual American city rather than having all these shots be computer generated? I sometimes felt like I was watching a video game: I felt guidy watching the city scenes swirl around in front of me in ways that couldn't be achieved in real life!
I did enjoy this movie though. Halle Berry looked great and the fight with Sharon Stone almost had me cheering for Catwoman. The script wasn't bad but the ending left a lot to be desired. Don't they realise that they need to make sure that the first movie makes money BEFORE they make room for a sequel? I somehow don't think a sequel to Catwoman is ever going to happen. Halle Berry's career will go on though. I think she will continue to be offered roles and people will continue to go seeing her, hopefully in better movies than this.
Martin
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