Raspberry Picking: Catwoman (2004)

Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Catwoman, nominee for six Razzies, winner of three (including, of course, Worst Picture), and the widely acknowledged Turd Standard for superhero movies of the 21st century.

But first! ‘Twas January of last year when the overlords of Alternate Ending made all my dreams come true by inviting me aboard, which means that Raspberry Picking celebrates its first anniversary this month! I’d like to thank everyone who has accompanied me on this meandering journey across the plains and plateaus and valleys of joy and sorrow and contempt and utter madness. It’s been a blast, and I look forward to my own continued suffering.

 

 

On to the main event! We are visiting today with Catwoman, winner of three Razzies (including, of course, Worst Picture), loser of $18 million, and wrecking ball smashed into the careers of just about everyone who had touched it.

It’s been a nice run of straightforward villain origin stories here at Raspberry Picking. That run is now ending just in time for the new year in a most spectacular way. Our specimen for today dates to 2004, but to tell its entire story, we must go all the way back to 1993.

Before Comic Book Cinematic Universes were even a dollar sign in Kevin Feige’s or James Gunn’s eyes, the Batman franchise was busy having its very own cinematic heyday. Batman (1989) had pulled in barrels of cash and surprise prestige award nominations and cementing the existence of the Serious Adult Superhero Movie. Warner Brothers brought back much of the same creative team and followed it up with Batman Returns (1992). Critics liked this one a little less – they were growing weary of the unrelenting dark tone and felt director Tim Burton had given outsize attention to the villains – but one aspect of the film garnered near-universal acclaim: Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance as Bruce Wayne’s sexy zombie nemesis-lover, Selina “Catwoman” Kyle. So in 1993, at the same time that Warner Brothers began developing Batman Forever (1995), they announced a Catwoman spinoff, in which Pfeiffer would star. Burton signed on to direct; Returns screenwriter Daniel Waters began work on a script. Everything seemed to be going smoothly.

Careful observers, however, will note that none of these people ended up attached to the version of Catwoman that actually got made. Burton got antsy with the Batman universe and began proposing other projects to Warner Brothers. The company was not keen on Waters’s script, which did not match the new lighthearted, family-friendly atmosphere of the just-released Batman Forever. Michelle Pfeiffer had a baby and announced that she could no longer commit to the project. With those three gone, there wasn’t really a creative team to speak of.

So Catwoman slunk off to wherever abandoned movie projects go to die until 2001, when writer John Rogers began work on a new script and Ashley Judd signed on to star as Kyle. Judd dropped out; Nicole Kidman briefly dropped in, then out; and in the meantime, unspecified “legal issues” meant that the film could not use Selina Kyle as the main character. Catwoman looked doomed yet again.

Then, in 2003, WB needed a quick and dirty replacement for a canceled Batman v. Superman project, and Oscar winner Halle Berry was looking for something to replace her own canceled film, which was to have been a James Bond spinoff starring her character Jinx Johnson. Catwoman was officially rushed into production, with a four-person writing team and French VFX supervisor Pitof at the helm. Got all that?

 

So by the time Catwoman made it to production, it was at the hands of a bunch of people who were brought in late, had no real investment in it, and couldn’t use most of the original plan for the movie, including the actual Catwoman character or any actual connection to the Batman franchise, but still had to make a Catwoman movie. Is it any wonder things did not go well?

And they surely did not go well. Reviews savaged the film and audiences lost interest early. Catwoman was such a blow to Halle Berry’s reputation that the Jinx spinoff got permanently canceled and she took a pay cut for X-Men: The Last Stand. Pitof, who had only directed one movie prior to Catwoman, never directed another feature film. Phil Tippett’s VFX studio, which created the film’s cats, went so far as to remove all mention of it from their website in the hopes of avoiding the taint. And the movie has gone down in history as one of the biggest superhero stinkers ever made.

So…you know how this works. Did Catwoman deserve what it got?

 

THE STORY

I’m probably both the exact wrong and exact right person to be asking this question. On the one hand – might as well play the game honestly – I don’t like most superhero movies, even the ones everyone else likes, so my standards for Catwoman aren’t high in the first place. On the other hand, I have no emotional attachment to the Batman franchise or the character of Selina Kyle/Catwoman, so if anyone can accept this movie for who it is, it’s me. Unfortunately, that still doesn’t work in its favor.

 

 

Catwoman pastes its opening credits onto a very slow and purposeless montage of cat worship throughout human history, starting naturally with the Egyptians and Bast and concluding with a boldface pamphlet headline about demonic cat cults. This will, unfortunately, have almost no relevance to the rest of the movie. Like all the laziest excuses for movies, it then shifts to breathy voiceover narration provided by its star, who informs us that the day she died was the day she really started to live.

But before she dies or lives or whatever, we must spend some time getting to know Patience Phillips (Berry), who is definitely not Selina Kyle, but is a dorky, klutzy, artsy type dissatisfied with her life and career. The job of signifying her dorky klutzy artsiness is too difficult for the writers. It has instead been passed to the wardrobe department, who achieve it by dressing her in discarded curtains from the 1970s.

 

Patience works as a graphic designer for a cosmetics company called Hedare Beauty, run by ruthless angry French-British man George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) and his model wife Laurel (Sharon Stone). She is having a rough time of it because she’s designing ads for Hedare’s big new launch, a miracle anti-aging cream called Beau-Line, pronounced “byoo-leen,” and excuse me, what the hell. That’s the ugliest product name I have ever heard. That’s a noise people emit when they’re trying to flirt at a bar but are too drunk to remember how. I am not a great buyer of cosmetics and am perhaps not the target audience, but I swear to God and his angels that I would rather put Farmer Dick’s Finest Goat Colostrum on my face than something called “byoo-leen.”

Anyway. There’s a subplot where Laurel is mad at George because he has forced her into retirement as the face of Hedare and Boo-Ween and replaced her with his twenty-one-year-old sidepiece Drina (Kim Smith), but even though this subplot is way more dumb fun than anything involving Patience, the movie disagrees, so here we are. Patience is working on the ad campaign and George thinks her work isn’t cutting it, and that’s stressing her out. She’s also been getting visits from a mysterious disappearing cat (played by 2004 computer-generated imagery). During one of those kitty visits, she ends up precariously perched on the window ledge of her apartment building, where a sexy cop with the ridiculous name of Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) mistakes her for a suicide victim and goes to rescue her, thus setting into motion a potential romance for – 

What’s that? Why no, there is no Catwoman in this movie called Catwoman yet, nor has the actual conflict been introduced. And shut up, will you, because everything’s going to get way worse once they arrive.

 

Patience, on her way back to the A Plot, stops by the Hedare headquarters to drop off her new concept for Blue-Green, but she stumbles onto a Super Secret Meeting behind a very unlocked door where Hedare’s top scientists are arguing about ethics because Flu-Sneeze is 1) addictive and 2) highly toxic, causing irreparable skin damage and heart attacks and probably climate change and all sorts of other very bad stuff. They discover Patience listening in and, naturally, murder her. Her body washes up on the sandbar where the mysterious disappearing cat and all his friends live, and they resuscitate her. With some changes. Like cravings for cream and catnip and a predilection for dominatrix gear.

 

THE BAD

Catwoman is a fascinating object for bad movie studies, because it works in reverse of how bad movie structure – or movie structure at all – should work. The crazy-long exposition of Catwoman is stupid, but it’s fun-stupid, and at least it’s trying to be something: a completely sincere if inept attempt at satire of the cosmetics industry and a culture that opposes female aging at all costs. Then Patience turns into Catwoman, and you would think that the batshittery dial would crank into overdrive at this point. You would be wrong. Post-transformation, Catwoman transforms instantly into a dull, neverending slog.

First, there’s the sheer uncaring laziness that drips like melting slush from the back two-thirds of the movie. A monologue that appeared in the film’s early trailers was lifted straight from The Crow – no, we’re not talking suspiciously similar, we’re talking identical words aside from the animal that They Say can bring your soul back from the dead. There’s a basketball sequence lifted right from Daredevil, and when you’re reduced to copying Daredevil, you reek of desperation. But don’t worry, they plagiarized good stuff too: Patience’s resurrection scene is cribbed right out of Batman Returns, except that it’s replaced that scene’s intimate creepy-crawly intensity with a generic “inspirational” montage of CGI cats worshipfully approaching Patience’s lifeless body, set to a soundtrack ripped off of Chariots of Fire.

 

But there’s one big exception to Catwoman’s indifference to itself, and that’s when it comes to the star. No, not Halle Berry. At least not all of her.

 

Let’s be clear: Halle Berry has copious callipygian merits. Her buttocks are very fit. They are very shapely. They are all-around superb specimens of the human female backside. What they are not is a source of forward momentum, either for Berry’s own movement or for the film’s narrative. Seriously, she walks so slowly, while the camera ogles her butt from every possible angle. You know in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when the USS Enterprise takes what feels like the entire Carter administration to leave the spacedock? It’s like that, but if the warp nacelles were a little rounder. Pitof and cinematographer Thierry Arbogast don’t just want us to enjoy Berry’s figure. They insist upon it, quite aggressively, to the point where they simply stop the film several dozen times so we can all caress her with our eyeballs again. It’s like a form of Halle Berry aversion therapy, and it works.

 

Berry herself didn’t deserve the volume of crap she took for starring in Catwoman, but nor does she do herself any favors. Pre-transformation, she’s breathy and twitchy and shrill; post-transformation, she has simply given up and goes for the most generic femme fatale you ever did see. Her complete lack of chemistry with co-star Benjamin Bratt doesn’t help, though Bratt is so lifeless he might as well have been made of the same CGI as the cats.

The movie set one very important and lasting trend, that of superhero movies whose creators haven’t the foggiest idea how to light a set. If there was anything interesting going on during Berry’s whip-cracking spree through LA, I couldn’t see it. If I could, it certainly passed by in a split-second flash due to the breakneck editing, or I might have missed it because of Pitof’s boundless love for nonsensical camera angles and reliance on terrible greenscreen effects. Unfortunately, I could hear it, which meant I didn’t miss out on any of the wretched dialogue these wretched people were forced to say. Poor Halle. No one could have made the line “I’m not good, but I’m only as bad as I wanna be” work.

 

THE GOOD

So everything after Catwoman becomes Catwoman blows. On the other hand, the first thirty to forty minutes of the movie are pretty enjoyable, mostly thanks to a colorful supporting cast. Lambert Wilson, in a one-note role as the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Greedy and Misogynistic Emblem of Corporate America, hammers that one note like the world’s most flamboyant double-bass player. He and Sharon Stone play off each other well, creating a darkly comical power couple dynamic in which these two people clearly detest each other, but also need each other for their respective egos and/or world domination plans.

 

Alex Borstein is also a lot of fun as Patience’s best friend and coworker Sally. Sally’s job, of course, is to be Patience’s bouncy-ball one-woman cheerleading squad who has no desires nor obligations of her own. But somewhere in the creative process, Sally got away from everybody and developed some personality traits, the primary one being that she is always incredibly and unapologetically horny. Seriously, the most satisfying moment in the film occurs when we learn that Sally has shacked up with her sexy ER doctor (James Lloyd Reynolds).

 

Frances Conroy as Ophelia Powers also hits a kooky bullseye in her one-scene-wonder role as a magical mystical wise woman who is also a crazy cat lady. Really, every single protein-based lifeform in the movie is, to some degree, more engaging than Catwoman. Which doesn’t make them good characters; it just means that their very presence on my television is not sapping me of my will to live.

The sound mixing is pretty good, smartly giving pride of place to Klaus Bedelt’s hyperdramatic score, which sounds like something Hans Zimmer would compose after several sleepless nights. Craftwise, there’s one sequence of Catwoman speeding through 4th Street on a motorcycle that’s also pretty fun to watch. Look, I’m trying over here.

I was rooting for you, Catwoman, I really was. Nothing would have given me more joy than to stick my finger into the MCU’s overstuffed ribs and declare that ackshually, this much-maligned little picture was way better than most of the mediocrities they’ve puked out lately. But it’s just bad, and most of it’s bad in a disheartening way. Good-bad movies can’t be this mechanical and soulless and cynical. If you want to relive the dumbest parts of the early aughts superhero wave, you’ll have better luck with Daredevil.

 

Quality of Movie: 1.5 / 5. It doesn’t have no redeeming features, but they’re few and far between.

Quality of Experience: 2 / 5. Unless the experience you seek is a nap.

You can read Tim’s review of Catwoman here!

PS: If you have a few minutes and want to see a good Halle Berry performance, watch her acceptance speech at the 2005 Razzies. She’s an excellent sport about the whole thing, and she’s careful to call attention to the aspects of the movie about which she has fond memories, while still eagerly agreeing with everyone that it’s trash.

 

Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida.  She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects.  You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog!  You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.