Hiss story
We already sorta knew Halle Berry was a cat, didn’t we? That slinky walk. Those big, blinky-blinky eyes. That soft voice. Purrrr. Here, Halle-Halle!
“Catwoman” simply makes it official. Or tries to.
In the movie version of the comic book, Berry isn’t Catwoman so much as a feline Janet Jackson in a series of glamour videos. Dressed in dominatrix leather, she performs vampy catwalks along high city ledges while the fake moon looms in the night sky. The music rocks. That cat tail swings east and west. And special effects specialist-turned- director Pitof goes crazy with fragmentary editing and slanted camera angles. (The most important contribution a director can make, especially one with a single name, is to draw attention to himself.)
As for the story, which details how meek, gentle Patience Phillips (Berry) came to be Catwoman, met a sexy detective (Benjamin Bratt) and defeated a skin-cream empire, it goes down (and comes back up) like a hairball.
Patience is a graphic designer, a mere drone at Hedare Beauty, the snazzy cosmetics corporation that’s about to unleash a radical anti-aging beauty cream. Under the slimy, fastidious thumb of George Hedare (Lambert Wilson), the company is about to ditch its spokesmodel, Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone), also the boss’s wife, for a newer, younger face. There are bad feelings all around. And in the middle of all this, Patience stumbles into a backroom meeting and makes a startling discovery.
Chased by Hedare security goons, she retreats into a big sludge tunnel. The bad guys close one side of the tunnel and flush her out over a big drop. No more Patience. That is, until a kitty from the Eygptian past (I am not making this up) leans down and breathes life back into her.
A new woman emerges, one who can scale buildings, execute somersaults and beat her opponents with extraordinary agility and nasty claws. Socially, there are some problems. She tends to hiss when she sees dogs. She can’t keep her eyes off the goldfish. And she loves catnip.
Then there’s the matter of getting revenge on the Hedares who killed her. But when Laurel frames Catwoman for murder, the slinky scaler becomes a fugitive from the law. She has to persuade Tom, who’s investigating the case, that she’s innocent. Meanwhile Tom, a professional detective who is in love with Patience, doesn’t have a clue that the woman behind that teeny mask is the object of his affections.
Berry is a physical treat for the eyes. And, yes, it isn’t every day that a movie about Manichaean good-and-evil turns on the right formula for skin cream. But these elements are not enough to make this superhero saga very engaging.
Bratt, actually, does best of all with his throwaway role. He’s almost believable, despite his inability to see through Catwoman’s disguise.
But as Patience’s friend Sally, former “Mad TV” star Alex Borstein gives us one of the most annoying sidekicks of all time. Stone, who finds herself in an utterly thankless role, as a sort of peroxide Cruella De Vil, must surely miss the days of “Basic Instinct” when she was all the rage. Now, as Laurel, she’s lamenting that George Hedare threw her away when she turned 40. It’s an apt metaphor for an entertainment industry that chews up its beautiful women just when they start to become really interesting. But in a movie as silly and misfired as this one, timely statements only make the experience more painful.