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
========== X-RAMR-ID: 38413 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1307180 X-RT-TitleID: 1134224 X-RT-AuthorID: 10821 X-RT-RatingText: 2/4
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