The editing for this film is TERRIBLE… the action has zero coherent connection during many key moments. The best sequence in the entire film is Halle at home having a phone conversation with Alex Borstein’s character and moving about idly balanced and nimble moving about the room.

The overall story and character work is pathetic. Nothing really genuine or resonate. There’s brief moments or shots of coolness constantly interrupted by lameness in the form of limp dialogue or directionless motivations. When this film doesn’t work it isn’t a funny ineptness, it’s more of a just unpleasant sensation of bile building up due to intellectual starvation.

As an adaptation, it is literally just terrible. No respect for the original material… and no real wonderful work of creativity replaces it.

Halle has some likability, as does her friend in the film. And the chemistry between her and Bratt is genuine. But this is not quite as good as SUPERGIRL, which in and of itself was a pretty bad film. Although, for me, I own SUPERGIRL on DVD for that one perfect moment in the film, where Helen Slater flies over that pool of water dancing and teasing her fingers along the surface. It was and remains magic. The score was fantastic on that film, and Faye Dunaway was grotesquely awful as the villain, while Sharon Stone was merely forgettable and worthless. Though not classically awful.

Catch it on cable some day, but rewarding this film with box office dollars will just breed further contempt for the medium being celebrated this weekend in San Diego.

This isn’t a disaster of a film, this isn’t the worst movie ever. This isn’t even close. I was kinda hoping that it would either be surprisingly great or ungodly awful to a point of satiric horror. Unfortunately the film has just the right enough of good moments to reach that impossible height in filmmaking that we call… mediocrity. Forgettable and uninspired.

What was good?

Not much, but… Whenever the film is about Patience/Catwoman and Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt), personally I feel it works. Of course, that aspect of the film is what most closely resembles a CATWOMAN movie. My favorite aspect of Catwoman, as a character was that she was a cat burglar that not only was superhumanly talented at break-ins and thievery.

That she had some sort of communicative ability with cats large and small. But that she loved to doubly torment those that would imprison her. Be they Batman or some handsome detective… she would seduce them in her alias, appeal to their naughtiness as Catwoman and fuck them humanly, letting them taste her magnificence, but at the same time fucking them professionally like they’d never been fucked before.

To me, the whole film should be focused on their game of Cat & Mouse… and Tom Lone is definitely the one sniffing for cheese.

I also, kinda liked Alex Borstein’s best friend of Catwoman character. Not so much that it’s an original character or even an inspired character. It isn’t. I just kinda liked her riffs and swagger.
Finally – the last aspect of this film that I appreciated was Thierry Arbogast’s cinematography.

I’ve been a fan of his through all those great turns with Luc Besson, and the look and richness of his nights and days were truly lush. Wasn’t the Cameron Blues or even rich deep blacks, but a gorgeous, nearly otherworldly look that was quite magical. Unfortunately it was edited like shit. Sigh.

Written by Harry Knowles
and posted on aintitcool.com