It’s an irony of cinema that you can actually wind up having a better time at a film if you go to see it with absolutely no positive expectations at all than if you have high hopes. In the latter case, you can be disappointed. In the former, all the film has to do is hold your interest and you come out ahead.
That was the case with “Catwoman.”
Seeing the film out of a sense of obligation to keep current with comic book films, Kath and I found a movie that was better than expected…probably because we thought it would suck.
The complaint that it has no relationship whatsoever to the DC Catwoman seems somewhat pointless since that ship sailed years ago with “Batman Returns.” Instead “Catwoman” endeavors to follow-up to, and provide some sort of coherent backstory to, the loopy origin of Catwoman as seen in BR, a film in which the only resemblance she bore to DC’s Catwoman was that she was named “Selina Kyle” (and could just as easily have been called “Patience Phillips” as she is here.)
The plot itself is astoundingly dumb, centering on a new cold cream that’s actually lethal. Naturally that’s what any company would want to produce: A product that will get them sued into bankruptcy and beyond. It’s Patience’s overhearing of this nasty plot device that gets her killed and then revived as the titular heroine.
Plus the dialogue is repeatedly wince worthy, with ostensibly clever lines landing all over the place like hairballs.
But what makes the thing go is Halle Berry and Benjamin Bratt. Berry is all pelvic thrust and feral intensity, and just a lot of fun to watch, while Bratt as the love interest (fleshed out about as much as the female love interest usually is in male-dominated actioners) takes a nothing character and makes you care about what happens to him.
As for Sharon Stone, with her ham-handed acting and arch detachment, she seems to be rehearsing for what is, to me the inevitable role for her: Nora Desmond in a remake of “Sunset Boulevard.”
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