Movie #990: Catwoman

Catwoman is a rather terrible superhero movie starring Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, Sharon Stone, Michael Massee, Byron Mann, Frances Conroy, Lambert Wilson, and Alex Borstein. 

Patience Phillips (Berry) is a perpetually frazzled marketing...artist person working for an evil cosmetics company run by the evil George Hedare (Wilson) and his equally evil wife Lauren (Stone). One night she runs afoul of them doing evil things and gets dumped into the river by their evil henchmen (Massee and Mann), but is brought back to life by a CGI kitty! 

From there she becomes Catwoman, kinda, and the movie can't quite decide if it wants to be a rom-com, a superhero movie, or a...I guess that's it, but they also try to shoehorn in Catwoman's propensity for stealing jewelry. Oh, the actual plot deals with some cosmetics that, used long term, make people sick and make their faces disintegrate...unless you keep using them, in which case it makes your skin like "living marble," to quote Lauren. 

Oh, right, and Patience falls for a cop improbably named Tom Lone (Bratt), who works alone, because that is officially as subtle as this movie gets. 

Look, this movie is famously bad. But as with Pluto Nash, shall we examine it a little and figure out if anything worked? 

The effects are terrible. The CGI is unconvincing, and there a bunch of big swoopy shots over a CGI city that look really terrible. The fight choreography is awful, too jump-cutty, and, again, we get a bunch of CGI of Halle Berry scampering around walls and looking absurd. The script reads like baby's first superhero movie and borrows heavily from better movies, notably The Crow and Batman Returns. 

But like...Halle Berry is a really good actress. She's not good here, but she swings for the goddamn fences and her physical performance is, if not exactly "good", then at least deliberate. She has some chemistry both with Bratt and with Alex Borstein as her wacky best friend, and actually with Sharon Stone, too. The cast in general is talented and that talent comes through, even if the script that they're working with is shiiiiiiit. (And I have a lot of respect for Berry showing up to claim her Razzie award, particularly since the dumpster fire that is this movie was not her fault.)

So the movie is actually kind of weirdly fun to watch, particularly with some kind of fermented libation to hand, which is more than I can say for a lot of the movies Toasty's given me. 

My Grade: D
Rewatch Value: Medium to medium-high, I think?

Next up: Stir of Echoes