Catwoman

Since I can’t give a zero as a star rating a half star will have to do for this dreadful piece of “filmmaking.” Halle Berry is woefully miscast as Catwoman, who bares absolutely no resemblance to her comic book counterpart and suffers from a literal interpretation of Tim Burton’s metaphorical cat resurrection. Her costume offers no body protection and is so ridiculous that I imagine even the most extreme of leather and dominatrix fetishist found it just too weird. Sharon Stone and Frances Conroy, both talented actresses, even if Stone often seems to forget that she can be an effective actress when she wants to be, find themselves somehow stuck in this shlock as the villainess and crazy/wise old mentor figure. I could go on and on about the awful special effects – wires holding Berry in place are visible in one scene and the needless jumping between live action and SFX work is distracting, at best – but there’s so much rip apart in the storyline. Why did they need to change this so much from the source material? Catwoman has been in DC publications for about seventy to eighty years. She has staying power and great material to work from. This is not what Bob Kane had in mind. It also speaks to how horrible a movie you have when even the image of Halle Berry in skintight, ultra-revealing leather makes straight teenage boys long for the images of Hugh Jackman and Tobey Maguire in their skintight outfits.