Friday, August 19, 2011

Who Let the Cat Out?: "Catwoman" Review

INTRODUCTION: Catwoman is an in-name-only-adaptation of the DC Comics character. Hallie Berry stars as the title "hero", with Sharon Stone as the "villian" and Benjamin Bratt as the love "interest".  The film also stars Lambert Wilson and Alex Borstein.

THE REVIEW: Catwoman is a remarkable film, not for what it does right, but for the fact that it does almost everything WRONG. Take Catwoman for example. The film makes it's first mistake by giving the powerless superheroine al of the super powers... of a CAT. If that weren't bad enough, the film keeps giving her powers that just don't make sense. Like freaking BASKETBALL POWERS. And if that wern't bad enough, she starts to behave like a cat too. Like, imagine, if in Spider-Man, Peter Parker not only had spider powers, but also spun webs and ate bugs. It be pretty freaking stupid.
    Plus, the whole film follows the story behind a supposedly toxic beauty cream. Yes, the magic item that starts the whole story isn't the Ark of the Covenant. It isn't an alien spaceship. No, it's a FREAKING BEAUTY CREAM. And the film  doesn't even know what the cream really does. For Stone's character, she says that if she uses it it turns her skin to marble, and if you stop your skin disintagrates. However, the best friend (Borstein) uses it all of the time and then stop using it... and nothing ever happens to her.
    The film also can get it's message right. The whole "female empowerment" theme is lazily forgotten during most of the movie. Not that if it was given more time it would be better. Catwoman was a timid woman who only begins to feel confident after she become a leather-clad, oversexed crime fighter. The only other female main characters are the cat lady, a woman whose willing to horribly disfigure other women for no good reason and a best friend that will have sex with anything that moves.

THE VERDICT: Catwoman fails on almost every concivible level. The message is lazy, the acting is phoned-in, the title character is a joke and the plot is an aboulute mess. The adaptation not only manages to ingnore everything the original charcter was while being a completely terrible movie in the process. Overall, it made me go 1.5 out of 6.

No comments:

Post a Comment