#70 - Catwoman (Rage4Media 5th Anniversary)

It’s the Rage4Media (formerly Rage Issues) 5^th Anniversary!!

And it’s been a tough year, I’ve had to drop to 2 reviews a week but hey, I covered the Blade Trilogy, I finished off my Superman reviews, having waited a year after finding out Kevin Spacey is a scumbag, only for the news that Brian Singer is a scumbag to overshadow it. I concluded both 4 issue tests and Sequel Baitings, but began a retrospective on Pixar sure to last me until the end of time. I actually tried doing a Halloween theme for October, no I haven’t seen Happy Death Day 2 and have no plans to in the foreseeable future.

I’m slowly rapping up my reviews of classic DC and Marvel films. I have a few to go with DC with stuff like Constantine, Steel and Jonah Hex but I do not plan to cover any more classic Marvel. I think all the ones I haven’t covered are the awful low budget sh*t they produced in the 90's and the like.

I've been slowly rebranding as Rage4Media, in case Rage Issues was too off-putting.

But speaking of DC films, that brings us to today, as we delve in to one of the worst DC films of all time, the #Cata5trophic Catwoman

The idea of a Catwoman movie had been toyed around with since Batman Returns, because that film was such a masterpiece it deserved a spinoff #sarcasm. Michelle Pfeifer was to return to the role and Tim Burton to direct, and Daniel Waters, who wrote Batman Return’s screenplay set to write. He made the unfortunate misstep of submitting his script right as Batman: Forever was release, and the studio rejected it on the grounds of its tone being more akin to Batman Returns, which of course had issues with merchandise.

The film was in development hell for the best part of a decade, with both Pfeifer and Burton dropping out and the story and screenplay being ultimately written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, straight off Terminator 3 with Theresa Rebeck, who had never written a film before, aiding with the story and John Rogers co-writing the screenplay, he’d only ever written stories for Box Office disasters at this point. (He’d later go on to write Transformers)

The directing duties for this film ultimately went to Pifof aka John-Chrisophe Comar, directing his first English Language film, his only non-English work as a director was the box office disaster Vidocq.

With such talent behind the scenes, you can tell we’re in for a treat, the movie floundered spectacularly, with an 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average 3.1/10, and an audience score of 18% with an average 2.2/5. For some perspective, these are identical ratings to Fant4stic, the movie I reviewed 3 years ago, the average critic score for that film was 3.47/10. We’re in trouble here, aren’t we?

Made with a $100m budget, the film was bomb at the box office, making back only $82.1m and received 7 Razzie nominations, of which it won 4.

So, does this rank up with the worst of them? Let’s take a look.

In the first interesting twist, the DC Comics logo doesn’t come up in the opening, in fact it’s nearly the end of the 3 minutes of opening credits we get any mention of it at all. Be very afraid… We open with some vague Egyptian imagery including a regal woman wearing cat masks. Their Catwoman logo is meant to convey that imagery, being found among hieroglyphs. Any DC Comics fan probably would’ve walked out the door already. We are 1 minute and 7 seconds in a 100-minute movie!

Remember when opening credits went on for ages, somehow this still feels longer. Halle Berry narrates as she’s drowning, I’m not sure what the point of starting in media res is nor this narration. So let’s cut to the awfully brown city of… Not Gotham as we meet Patience Phillips… I’m done

OK, I’m back, and let’s not rush to conclusions, let’s give this a shot. Anyway, Patience is played by Halle Berry and we meet her friend, Sally (Alex Borstein), who’s addicted to some makeup made by the company they work for. It’s a corporate entity so naturally they’re the villains of the movie. Apparently, the cream she’s using isn’t even in production yet, which means she’s somehow procured a test prototype that might have harmful side effects. I mean, worse than the harmful side-effects that this will inevitably have anyway, because this movie needs to have a plot revolving around an evil makeup company. And to add some obvious foreshadowing, Sally is experiencing headaches.

Cut to a business meeting, and now’s a good time to mention the awful cinematography of this movie. The speech could maybe have a couple reaction shots, some shot/reverse/shots for the back and forth between our 2 founders and maybe a couple of cuts to any important images on the screens. This scene has 37 shots! And a lot of them rotate the camera around the room for no reason. I’m feeling dizzy just watching it!

OK, so the plot, they’re launching a new makeup brand in 1 week that supposedly reverses the effects of ageing. I’m sure it does… Anyway, for the launch they’ve decided that the usual model, the co-owner of the business Laurel Hedere (Sharon Stone) will be replaced with a younger one. Excuse me, but the whole point of this product is to reverse the effects of ageing, what’s the point in using a younger model?!

So, Patience is to present her campaign to George Hedere (Lambert Wilson), the other co-owner of the business and Laurel’s husband. Apparently the red is too light, and needs to be darker. That’s something anyone with a computer could fix in literally seconds, so naturally she has an arbitrary deadline of midnight tomorrow to fix it.

Patience lives in a crummy apartment, with noisy neighbours preventing her from sleeping and being too meek to stand up to them. This is naturally a setup for some contrast later on. It’s so blatant it’s kinda sad. The next morning, she sees a cat sitting on a ledge, apparently stuck. She decides the smart thing to do is to go out on the ledges herself to try and get it.

This leads to the convenient introduction to Officer Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) who somehow managed to spot her several stories up from close range whilst in his car and stop, convinced she might be a jumper. Please just let her fall, this movie will be over a lot quicker that way. He races up to her apartment at super-human speed and unfortunately manages to save her just in the nick of time.  

She realises she’s running late and runs off, by the looks of it forgetting to lock her door. It can’t be one of those that requires a key to open, Tom Lone just got in without a problem! You clearly aren’t in a good neighbourhood, you really shouldn’t be leaving your door unlocked.

She drops her purse on her way out as we cut back to the pharmaceutical company as Laurel sees her face being replaced by the new model in the ad board they have conveniently placed all around reception. George tells her some things, and they have to cancel Lunch so he can go talk to some scientists.

“Man sandwich, 12 O’Clock”

I don’t know this character is, I’ve never seen him before, but f*ck this character! Take your 90's gay stereotype back to the decade it came from. Then nuke it for good measure. Naturally Tom has come buy to return Patience’s purse. But of course his introduction to Sally is made awkward by some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard

“Tom Lone, rhymes with Cone, and Phone, and Bone”

Whoever wrote that line should be f*cking ashamed! No human being would ever say that, nothing resembling a human being would say that. I’ve heard bad dialogue in my time: “They’re not dumb, they’re just horrifically evil,” “I have learned that there is a difference between right and wrong,” “Not the war again” “Dude, where’s my car” (No particular line, just all of it), “I work for the bla bla bla and they gave me a licence to bla,” “Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and your Gatorade, we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way to the ballpark.” “I love dogs, I’ve always loved dogs,” “We gotta go to Krispy Kreme, Jason.” “His name is Paris, Paris Franz,” “Remember, there is no Light or Dark, no good or evil, no human or spirit, all are one,” “Girls ruin everything” “I don’t like sand, it’s course, rough and irritating and it gets everywhere,” “They’re not powers, they’re aggressively abnormal physical conditions,” “The moon’s an egg,” “This is Katana, she got my back…”“My suit’s turned black. I like it but I think it’s something bad,” “Martha, save Martha,” “Why did you say that name!?” and “It’s a web.” Okay, some of these are only bad in context, but this line is worse than all of them.

Tom begins looking over her artwork and shouldn’t you be getting back to work, Mr Lone. He’s apparently here to apologise for saving her life and invite her out for coffee. She accepts, and Sally tells her to wear her leather outfit, something Patience says she’ll never do but so naturally that’s the foundation for her Catwoman outfit.

The rest of the day goes by like a literal blur, and now it’s so late the lights have all dimmed to mask the obvious daylight coming through the blinds. The arbitrary deadline is closing in and Patience can’t get a messenger to deliver the completed ad. At 11:43pm no sh*t. She goes to take it herself and we cut to the fakest looking building I’ve ever seen.

Naturally being whatever time it was, it’s locked. Quick question, your boss’ office was in the building you worked in, why not deliver it there? So, time for a sciency presentations, how many shots are they gonna need this time? 13? Well that would be an improvement, except this meeting was considerably shorter and didn’t have crowds.

The makeup is apparently addictive and if you stop using it your face turns into something out of a horror movie. For some reason we see Laurel there but not George, who was the one who said he had to talk to the scientists. Patience gets a glimpse of this and now is marked for death, chased by security guards. She runs through some shelves, an orange room full of pipes and ends up right by the mudslide leading into some waste pipes, as is common in buildings.

Laurel orders the pipe sealed and Patience is flooded out of the pipe, falling the cliff that I didn’t see during the establishing shot, into the water. A fake as hell CGI cat looks upon her as she floats. Somehow, she’s washed ashore about 25ft and is surrounded by cats, one of whom does the only sensible thing it can do, breathe on her. Eww, fishy breath.

So, this is the origin story of Catwoman. Once again, they’ve been compelled to give a character who is very simple an overly complicated origin story. Catwoman is a cat burglar who has a cat-themed costume and gadgets, that’s all you ever needed to know about her. I stand by saying the Dark Knight Rises still has the most comic accurate version of Catwoman when it comes to live action movies, not that this one posed any threat in that regard.

She wakes up, now hypnotised by the sound of birds, and spiders for some reason. Somehow she manages to make it back to her neighbourhood and despite the fact we saw her leave the door unlocked, she jumps up to the window, showcasing her heightened agility, and smashes her way in.  

She wakes up the next morning, on a shelf and gets a message from Shelly reminding her of her date with Tom, naturally she doesn’t make it and she has to get back to work. Why did he arrange the date during the middle of his shift? The cat from earlier shows up again, and Patience finds out he belongs to a woman named Ophelia Powers (Frances Conroy – no relation to Kevin Conroy) address 647 Elm Street. Does that mean Freddy Kreuger is gonna show up and this? Please have him show up and end this.

She lives in the only 2-story house in the middle of a street of Skyscrapers. Patience is invited in and we see that Ophelia’s one of those crazy cat-ladies you hear about. The cats take an usual shine to Patience but as she awkwardly tries to leave, Ophelia tosses a ball of catnip at her and she begins rubbing it against her nose. What the hell is this?

George reads her the riot act when she gets to work as he never received the designs. Patience doesn’t seem to be listening as for some reason she’s drawing a picture of his face with a giant tongue, huh? Her subsequent actions get her fired, although the department cheer for some reason. She then gets defensive when she passes some dogs, starts hissing, and displays a penchant for expensive jewellery, well at least that’s accurate.

Sally falls over suddenly because we needed her out of the plot. She was already relatively superfluous to it. Anyway, she encourages Patience to try and fix things with Jon. Speaking of Jon, he’s busy running some kind of basketball kids club or something. Why this is here is not worth talking about and once we’re done with this scene it won’t be mentioned again.

Patience brings him a coffee to say sorry, she even wrote ‘Sorry’ on the cup and because we’re pushing boundaries here, this is actually a plot point.  He admits that he’s a bit of a loner (jeez, Tom Lone is sounding sillier every time I say it), something that really could’ve been shown to us, but I guess informed attributes are better than nothing. OK, we’re looking at a basketball 1-on-one match in a confined space, are we betting 20 shots, any advance on 20? 30, I’m hearing 30… 68 shots, I counted 68, just of the two competitors. Not only is this scene dragged out to hell, it cuts to itself repeatedly. This editing is out of control!

We get it, she’s more agile, we already saw that, moving on. I know this’ll come as a shock to you, but Laurel’s marriage isn’t a particularly happy one. She believes, and she’s probably right, that her husband is cheating on the new model. Psst, I think they’re setting her up as the main villain and her husband is just a jerk red herring. I mean they’re being so subtle about it.

Cut to Patience eating Tuna out of the can because of course she is as Sally returns, yay, she’s still in the hospital but gets ask about how it all went. She goes off to flirt with a Doctor, because of course she does, as it’s finally time for the payoff to the noisy neighbours subplot. Because I know you’re dying for some payoff there.

She comes to the door, kicks it down, sprays the speakers with… semen? I’m gonna go with semen. Breaks the dispenser tube and begins using it as a whip, yes, seriously. Next, she gets out the leather outfit she said she’d never wear and begins cutting her hair in the mirror. She steals a motorbike and once again the editing goes into overdrive and everything looks blurred and out of focus. Not to mention some shots are just sped up for no reason

Remember that necklace she eyed before, she stares at it as some masked thieves robbing the place. The cages are filled with masks for some reason so Catwoman takes on and confronts the thieves. They decide to shoot her with their shotguns so many times it creates a dust cloud. OK, it’s time for a fight, starting when she lands her first hit, how many shots? You’re wrong, 76 is the number I counted. And don’t get me wrong, you do need to have cuts in an action scene, the problem is the repeated cuts make it difficult to tell what’s going on. There are shots that last a few seconds, but those all have some sweeping motion with the camera, making it difficult to get a fix on things.

The next morning, she wakes up, on the floor, with her bed covered in stolen jewels. She packs them into a bag, minus that necklace she liked and returns it somehow without being spotted by the police. This is the only real time a dual personality between Selena and Catwoman is implied. She also left a box of cupcakes because…

Patience begins doing research on cats, trying to work out what’s happened to her. Even this scene has frantic editing. Rather than going to, I don’t know, maybe some sort of medical professional, she decides to go see Ophelia again.

Turns out she was a Professor for 20 years until she was denied tenure because of, in her words, ‘Male Academia,’ I’ll swing back to this in a moment. The Cat, Midnight, knew that Patience was to die, and tested her by forcing her to be f*cking stupid out on the ledge, and because she passed the test, she gave her a gift, the cat-powers that Patience now possess. She’s given it to others over the centuries and they’re all Catwomen. And you say it’s “Male Academia” that got out of work. No, it’s because you pedal these outlandish and frankly stupid theories.

Patience is Catwoman, and the latest in a long line of them. I guess that’s a way to brush off her not being Selina Kyle but I don’t know, the idea that the character has a lineage makes Catwoman feel less special. Incidentally this scene should've just been merged with the last one, there's no reason for 2 visits here. Patience decides to try and find out who killed her and why and she decides to make some ‘modifications’ to the costume.

This costume is awful, Catwoman is usually one of the more sexualised female characters as it is, but now she looks like a side attraction in a strip club! Complete with ripped jeans for no reason at all. You’d freeze to death in the winter wearing that and naturally there’s no pouches for any gadgets, or even somewhere to put away the whip you know she’s gonna have. Catwoman’s costume is supposed to be at least somewhat practical.

Also the CGI remains shockingly bad. She spots one of the people who tried to kill her back at the warehouse, odd, last I checked she doesn’t even remember it. She follows him to a club that’s sprung up in the midst of shipping containers. Catwoman orders cream, ha! I guess she didn’t pay for it either

After giving the audience seizures with it’s flashing lights she confronts the guy and tosses him into an alley. They were amongst shipping containers, where did this spring up from? One over-edited fight later, she interrogates him, making the obvious pun. She heads back to the factory, breaking in are we that climax already, wow, this movie went by quick *checks time code* we’re less than an hour in?

She finds the scientist from earlier dead, and flashes back to him unveiling his conscience on the day of her death. A guy spots her and sounds the alarm and yeah, she gets framed for the murder. Never heard this one before… Patience tells Sally to lay off the beau-line moisturiser, piecing together that that’s what’s been making her sick.

The police of course are all on this and Tom sees the similarities between the 'sorry' written on the jewel bag and the 'sorry' written on the coffee Patience gave to him. It’s almost as if it’s the exact same signature. He takes it to a handwriting expert because lord knows it wasn’t obvious or anything. The handwriting expert spouts some guff and somehow doesn’t believe they’re the same person. So now's the perfect time for Tom and Patience to go the fair that’s in the middle of an alley.

They’re stuck at the top of a ferris wheel which begins to break apart because it’s dramatically convenient. Tom goes climbing down to as Patience notices one of the kids about to fall. She uses her ‘cat-like’ reflexes to save her as Tom does… I’m not even sure. So Patience breaks into the Hedare mansion and finds Laurel. She believes that George is the one responsible for the scientist’s murder, keeping the secret of the beau-line makeup. Laurel plays along with this, telling her that George is at an opera house watching a performance of… whatever the hell that is, and giving her a phone so she can contact her.

Catwoman arrives but forgoes stealth by making it so anyone can see her in every mirror so a guard gets the cops involved. Her brief attack on George shows his confusion, implying he knew very little about beau-line’s side effects. It’s soon interrupted by the police and she climbs into the rafters to evade them. Tom confronts her and a we get a badly edited fight scene of course, naturally she gets away.

OK, so Tom has now seen Catwoman up close. She is about the right height, has the same skin colour, and sounds the same as Patience, how does he still not know?! They head to a sushi restaurant and you know Cats and fish, right? And something I’ve just realised, Patience is unemployed, and she’s not stealing, aside from that necklace but I don’t believe she intended to pawn it. How is she f*cking living now?

It soon becomes sexy time between them and she even purrs during the sex. They got Halle Berry to purr, I feel bad for her. Officer dumbass finally gets a clue when he trips on one of Catwoman’s claws that she had conveniently lying about. He finds a glass with her DNA on it, and leaves. Right as Laurel calls, telling her they need to stop George tonight as he’s about to launch the beau-line at a press conference.

Tom compares the DNA from the glass to the lipstick marker on his cheek from the opera house and there’s a 99.9% match. Fun fact, you can’t actually lift someone’s DNA off a photograph like that! Still, Tom knows and must feel like a real dumbass now for ignoring the obvious clues.

Laurel claims to have enough evidence to put ‘somebody’ away for good. Catwoman discovers that George has been murdered, in a manor that looks like Catwoman. Laurel confesses to having done it to ensure beau-line gets launched. I see money draining from your account faster than you can say ‘class action lawsuit.’ Anyway, for some reason, she throws Catwoman a gun and I really don’t get why.

It doesn’t implicate Catwoman any more than she already was, the gun itself wasn’t the murder weapon, or at least not that I could tell and Patience is wearing gloves so it’s not like her fingerprints would be left on it either. Laurel sounds the alarm and police begin to swarm the building, but that doesn’t stop Catwoman checking herself out in the mirror.  

And that’s the end of that scene, next thing we see is Patience walking him, jittering with every siren. She makes it home but of course Tom is waiting there, LOCK YOUR DAMN DOOR! She’s arrested and it’s revealed George was shot. OK, didn't see the bullet wound when we saw the body so now the question is, if the point was framing Catwoman, having her seen with the gun that killed him would be enough, why the claw-marks? Patience makes her case but of course she isn’t believed, although Tom is less sure afterwards.

So, Patience slips between the bars because, she can do that apparently and slips by the cops, steals a car and races off to the launch of Beau-Line. Or an advance press screening of it, free samples are distributed. Detective Lone arrives, wanting a word in private as Catwoman sneaks around the delivery warehouse, running a chain that sabotages the delivery.

Lone tricks Laurel into confessing her involvement, something that would in no way stand up in court so she shoots him, his main character shield means he’s only injured and Catwoman arrives to save him from a fatal shot. And it’s time for the climax so place your bets ladies and gentlemen, how many shots are there going to be. Once again, we’re starting when first blood is shed. In this case, it’s a spin kick. Can they top every other awful action scene? Of course, they can! I’m pretty sure I missed a few shots when I counted this but I counted 267 shots. And even then, they can’t even keep the camera still!

There is a bit of dialogue as it’s revealed that Beau-line turns your skin to marble if you use it for long enough, marble that’s not very good since Catwoman eventually hurts her, scratches off the makeup and she ultimately falls in awful CGI to her doom. OK, so some comments on this, firstly this is some bullsh*t, second it really does feel a bit sexist to have a lead superheroine go up against evil makeup, and third, this sounds like the renew-u formula from Batman: The Animated series.

That formula lead to the creation of an iconic Bat-villain that’s yet to be seen in live action, Clayface. He’d sure be much more interesting as a final boss than whatever the hell this fight was supposed to be. So, with Catwoman’s kill count up to 4 (as far as the public knows) and Laurel unable to exonerate her, naturally there’s a fool proof plan to have her freed. All patience needs to do is be back in her cell, and it’d be a tough call to prove she was Catwoman.

This obviously implies that the police at the station are so stupid they haven’t noticed her escape yet. The plans to interrogate the staff to shine a different light on the murders might be slightly more possible though.

So, Sally has gotten with the doctor, I know you’re so concerned what happened to her and Catwoman leaves a 'Dear John' for Tom, she’s left for non-specific and stupid reasons. And this brings the film to its merciful conclusion.

This movie cost $100m… I hope those paychecks were worth it

Catwoman is bad, really bad. As an adaptation of the character of Catwoman it doesn’t come close. They nuked any chances of that simply by changing the name of the character but even spiritually it’s wrong, Catwoman is a thief, not a metahuman with cat-powers derived from Egyptian gods. It’s all needlessly complicated.

But as a film, it might be even worse. The story is insanely boring for the first half, that is if you aren’t busy cringing at the atrocious dialogue or the awkward wide-angle shots of people’s faces. The second half approaches so-bad it’s good territory with how moronic and badly done every single facet of production is. None of the acting is worthy of merit, although given the material they had to work with, it’s hard to blame the actors for this.

The camera work ranges from bland to aggravating, the editing is atrocious, the fight scenes are some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Most of the characters are underwritten and bland, the villain’s about as cliché as you get. I applaud them trying but the red herring setup doesn’t work, she’s confirmed as the villain too early. The CG is atrocious, even for 2004 and did I mention how bad Catwoman’s costume looks.

I have nothing positive to say about this film, it’s a failure on every level

THIS MOVIE GIVES ME RAGE ISSUES!

Rating 100000000000000000000000000000000000%