The Unseen Movie Review

Catwoman

This film has been well over a decade in the making, but you’d never guess to look at it. As played by Michelle Pfeiffer, the Catwoman of 1992’s Batman Returns became a sultry, sexy, instant cinematic icon. The plan was that more Batman films would follow and his kinky rubber-clad female foe-cum-lover would get her own spin-off series, much as Jennifer Garner’s Elektra has got her own movie on the back of 2003’s Daredevil.

But Warner Brothers faffed about and Pfeiffer lost interest. Various replacements were mooted, but then two Warners superhero projects, the Dean Cain/Terri Hatcher Superman TV series and Tim Burton’s planned Superman film, were cancelled within a year of each other. Warners seemed to have lost interest in superheroics for good.

Since the wild and unexpected success of Blade and Warners’ own Matrix in 1998-9, superhero flicks have made an incredible comeback. We’ve had X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, The Hulk – all big hits, but none of them for Warners. The studio’s execs were understandably getting a bit miffed. Over the last few years, several proposed Batman films have fallen through, and the Superman project remains trapped in development hell, with practically every director in Hollywood having been involved at some stage. Warners really, really wanted a superhero hit to avoid missing the boat that their own films arguably launched.

This is not the hit they were looking for.

Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was Selina Kyle, mal-treated secretary doing her bit for feminism by getting her revenge on her chauvinistic boss via a violent and sexually dominant alternate personality. Here, Halle Berry’s is Patience Philips, a graphic designer for a cosmetics company, trying to stop the release of a dangerous new anti-aging drug. There is, to be fair an attempt to link the two feline avengers, but it’s a half-hearted one at best.

Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was tortured, confused, self-destructive, tragic and so utterly sympathetic despite her dubious morality and motives. Her doomed split-personality love affair as Selina/Catwoman with Bruce Wayne/Batman was a wonderful piece of character motivation and plot tension. None of that is present here.

Berry’s Catwoman is more single-minded and self-assured, and so less complex and far less interesting, and the plot is too simplistic to hold any real interest. Added to that is the fact that, although Berry is undeniably hugely attractive, she simply isn’t as sexy here as Pfeiffer was in the same role. Part of the point of the character is her sex appeal, yet bar a couple of overly gratuitous scenes, here it is non-existent. The less said about the truly awful costume the better.

Why turn a character that was sexy and complex into one that is bland and boring? Why churn out a predictable, threadbare plot when you’ve had twelve years to perfect the script? The answer is sadly simple: Warners didn’t want to take any risks. They wanted a superhero film to leech some of the success rival studios have been having, but knew that their new star-laden Batman Begins film wouldn’t be ready for a while. They didn’t want to miss the boat, so this has been churned out in the meantime in a highly cynical attempt to sucker fans of some of the great superhero films of the last few years into parting with their hard-earned dosh. Let’s just hope that next year’s Batman flick isn’t such a half-hearted job as this.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM