Recently I have been giving mostly positive reviews. This week's film will not get one. We are looking at Catwoman, the 2004 reboot of the Catwoman origin story. There are many things wrong with this movie including its subject, cast, plot, acting, writing, and its themes. Abandon hope all ye who enter here...
Catwoman is a character from the Batman series. You probably know that. She also has an incredibly complex and contradicting back story. Originally she was Selina Kyle, a cat burglar, nothing too special, just a thief, but a good one. It was established in the Batman comics very early that there was a romantic connection between her and Batman and this is probably the only part of her character that has remained the same over the years. Her origin stories in different comics has her as a cat burglar, an amnesiac flight attendant, a prostitute, a nun, as well as being an expert gymnast and martial artist, in one origin story trained by an armless ninja. Over the years her origin changes and she shifted from villain to hero to anti-hero. Understanding the character is already a mess as you can see, and the film versions only added to the confusion. Much like Batman, Catwoman had no powers and instead relied on skill, cunning, and gadgets to be a super villain. This is a very brief description of the character that leaves out a lot. Luckily for us, the movie disregards every origin story in the comic universe so who cares if I left anything out.
The history of Catwoman's production goes back to 1992 to Tim Burton's Batman Returns...which was a good movie. In this film Selina Kyle plays the role of timid secretary to the evil industrialist Max Schreck who tries to kill her by pushing her out a window. This film marked the modern popular reinterpretation of Catwoman as some kind of superhero with powers. After her attempted murder her comatose/dead body is swarmed by a bunch of stray cats and she comes back to life with a multiple personality disorder where all of her frustrations with being a timid woman in a man's world are unleashed when she dons her mask and takes on the persona of Catwoman. While this never happened in the comics there is president for this. Over the years Catwoman turned into the feminist power character over at DC. While she had conflicting origin stories it is generally true in whatever incarnation of comics that Selina was at one time abused by men and becomes Catwoman in part to take revenge but mostly to express her more aggressive tendencies that had previously been building. The revenge part also extends into protecting other helpless women. So, the Batman Returns Catwoman was being just as faithful to the character in spirit. In fact this was probably one of the better representations of Catwoman's character as the whole movie focused on the darker side of the Batman universe. Let's be honest, Catwoman has a lot of fun jumping around in a skin tight vinyl catsuit and blowing up department stores, but at the root of it is her psychological trauma and the film focuses on that. The producers of the film were less than enthusiastic about Burton's final product due to the dark storyline and adult portrayals of the characters compared to Burton's Batman which was a fun colorful and cartoony take on Batman harkening more back to the days of Adam West then contemporary comics. And so Burton was removed from the Batman series and new talent was brought in. Burton however loved his second Batman film more than the first and wanted a spin off film following his Catwoman character. He tried to get his spin off project off the ground for years but it stagnated into near oblivion.
And now enters our production staff from stage right led by our writers. All three of them had lengthy filmographies, with Theresa Rebeck being a prominent writer for television. The pair of John Brancato and Michael Ferris have almost the same filmography working together for years. Surprisingly they both were responsible for Terminator Salvation and Surrogates, both movies I liked. So far this is a reasonably tame writing staff. The odd man out worked on the screenplay not the story, John Rogers. John Rogers worked on such atrocities as The Core and Transformers as well as The Adventures of Jackie Chan. Catwoman seems to have been the setup for Transformers. Take a good idea with a long history of success and a large fan base, and use a poorly thought out fan fiction as your story which grossly ignores and goes against the canon of the established character. In this case he is using Burton's story of Catwoman. This is an instance I think where Burton should have had more creative input and stayed on the project. I think it would have had a lot more depth to it had he not move on to bigger and more horrible films. In fact, the producers are the only connection to the original source material at all as the producer worked on all of Burton's early films and 2 more have been involved in every Batman related project in the last 30 years. As director they chose Pitof, a French special effects man. Apparently he's pretty good working on Alien: Resurrection and City of Lost Children. He is not, however, a good director. I have not seen the only other film he directed and have no desire to. This seems to be a chronic problem in Hollywood. If you are around movies long enough you start to think you can run the show. Special effects men are very knowledgeable about the process and visual aesthetics of film, possibly more so than many directors. This does not mean they can direct the human element or piece together a good story.
The cast is what sold this film, and by cast I really mean Halle Berry. Fun Fact: Halle Berry played the secretary in The Flinstones, Sharon Stone. Halle Berry in Catwoman is fighting the evil Laurel Hedare, played by Sharon Stone. Halle Berry got her start as a model and moved into acting. She got into movies in the early 90's and quickly found success. In the mid 90's her career picked up and she became the spokeswoman for Revlon, a cosmetics company. She seems to have been fighting her way to the top until her big break in 2000 with X-Men where she became a well recognized actress, quickly defining her as the hot ethnic woman in an action movie. In rapid succession she was in X-Men, Swordfish, Die Another Day, and X2. Notice a pattern? However she has since faded from the good graces of the public due to several poor career moves such as Gothika and i, which earned her a Razzie for worst actress in 2005. I don't know if the writers were going for some kind of subtle irony, but Berry was an interesting casting choice given that in 2004 she renewed her Revlon contract and at the same time was working on Catwoman where the villain runs a cosmetics company. As far as acting talent goes, this did not seem to be on the casting directors checklist. Berry gave a horrible performance as did every other actor in the film. I understand they weren't given a lot to work with and the idea was already a reboot of a story that was intended to be a spin-off, not even a sequel, but really, most of Berry's role in the film is to walk around and look pretty, it's a little embarrassing. On the subject of visual aesthetics, Michelle Pfeiffer was originally approached to reprise here role from Batman Returns but turned down the role because the costume was uncomfortable. Guess it's good they got a model to play the part.
At this point the changes to this version should be mentioned. As I said earlier, Selina Kyle becomes Catwoman. Well, in this version, Catwoman is Patience Phillips, a name change due to an inability to obtain full rights from DC I'm sure. However this is covered up in a quick scene where it is revealed that there have been catwomen through history and Selina Kyle from Batman Returns is in one of the images shown. It's a sloppy cover up and serves no purpose other than to appease fans, but since anyone who cared about the Catwoman comics or earlier movies is going to hate most of this movie it's a poor concession. The other major change is that Catwoman actually has super powers. In every incarnation she never had any but now she obtains powers through...wait for it...the Egyptian cat god Baset. That's right, Catwoman is not only brought back from the dead by an Egyptian deity, but also imbued with mystical powers.
I can forgive a lot in a film, however there is one thing about Catwoman that grated me all the way through and that was the sexist/feminist themes from start to finish. If there is anything that bothers me in a film its having a social message crammed down my throat, but this film can't even decide on that. I really don't understand what the film makers were going for with this one. Catwoman does have elements of female empowerment to her character, and if they had stuck to that the message might have gotten annoying after a while but at least it would have been coherent. This film does not know its audience. In one scene it will be showing Catwoman as the strong, sexy, confident woman, crushing men beneath her 4 inch heels, and the next women are portrayed in horrible stereotypes like they are suddenly trying to appeal to a male audience. What's more, the villain, also a woman, runs a cosmetics company. It's like a bad crossover between Barbie and DC. And of course there is also the woman who reveals to Patience the history of the catwomen who was expelled from academia for her theories, though she says it's because she is a woman. I'm sorry but if the crazy cat hippy at my school started publishing papers about how the Egyptian cat goddess Baset was resurrecting wrongfully killed women though history and giving them superpowers I would kick her out too. This film suffers from a female-centric casting without a clear reason. If they were going for the female demographic I suppose this makes sense but that's not the demographic you market a comic book movie to. The film portrays women in every negative stereotype, timid, scantily clad, obsessing over their looks, owning lots of cats, etc...and tries to make up for it all by saying, "but look! Catwoman can beat up men so it's ok." On the subject of male portrayal...with the most screen time is our love interest, Tom Lone, who is a police officer and strangely enough probably has the funniest scene in the film where he mistakes Patience being stuck on the ledge of her building for a suicide attempt. Otherwise he is an all around nice guy and incredibly bland. He plays basket ball with intercity kids, gives crazy Patience second chances, let's her out of jail because "he trusts her...?", and does all the behind the scenes heroics that Catwoman doesn't take care of. All in all he's pretty easy to understand, he has no character development or purpose other than to give Patience a contact to the police and a romantic connection to create a poor attempt at drama. Next highest billed actor plays George Hedare, Laurel's playboy husband. I'm sure he was picked because he plays a good jerk. He spends the whole movie, until his untimely demise, having an open affair, with several more hinted at, and pretending to run his cosmetics company, which his wife actually takes care of. Womanizer, wife beater, abandons his responsibilities, abuses his power, on top of being a capitalist and making Patience sad! I think they had to cram in a few extra negative traits since there are so few men in this film that weren't armed henchmen or jewel thieves.
What really bothers me about this is that they didn't need to film the movie this way. Nothing was stopping them from making a good Catwoman film that had a strong female lead and a strong female antagonist with male supporting characters that were also well developed. Instead they went for a caricature of the reality of gender relations as if the audience wouldn't get the more subtle hints. They went out of their way to focus on the sexuality and not the gender inequality issues of the characters. Watch a film like Alien or Terminator 2. Does it really matter that the main lead is a woman? No, Ripply or Sarah Connor being women barely effect the plot but they are both incredibly strong and well written characters. Every time I see something like Catwoman it makes me want to cry. Films like this basically make the argument you just have to be confident and flaunt your sexual power over men and that will make you powerful. There is so much more to writing a strong and independent character and that is why it is so rarely done, and even rarer with female characters.
What all this boils down to is a modern reinterpretation of the "breeches role". After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 theaters reopened after several years of Puritan influence in the government. One of the new developments was the allowance of actresses to perform on stage. The most common incarnation of this was the breeches role where women dressed as men and usually had to expose themselves in some fashion as a plot point of them being discovered to be women. While the allowance of women to act on stage is argued to be a great leap forward for women, it became a way not for actresses to display their skill, but a way for poor young women not wanting to be prostitutes to be provocative on stage and catch the eye of a wealthy noble. Catwoman does the same thing. It pretends to be a movie about strong female characters proving themselves in a male world but it's really all about watching Halle Berry prance around in tight leather.
I don't recommend you see this unless you are looking for a bad movie. If you are then this film is for you! So far this film still hasn't made back its $100 million budget and it's not likely to. Somehow most of the cast has come out of this harrowing experience with their careers intact. Let's hope that Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Rises will treat Catwoman with a lot more respect than this one did.
Movies Referenced:
2012-Dark Knight Rises
2009-Terminator Salvation
2009-Surrogates
2007-Transformers
2004-Catwoman
2003-Gothika
2003-X2
2003-The Core
2002-Die Another Day
2001-Swordfish
2000-X-Men
1997-Alien: Resurrection
1995-City of Lost Children
1992-Batman Returns
1991-Terminator 2
1989-Batman
1979-Alien
