Catwoman – Film Review

Patience Philips (Halle Berry) is a woman who can’t seem to stop apologizing for her own existence. She works as a graphic designer for Hedare Beauty, a mammoth cosmetics company on the verge of releasing a revolutionary anti-aging product. When Patience inadvertently happens upon a dark secret her employer is hiding, she finds herself in the middle of a corporate conspiracy. What happens next changes Patience forever.

The fact that Pitof‘s Catwoman is even a real thing in existence is actually kind of amazing because it may very well be the strangest, dream-like movie I’ve ever seen. Nearly every single scene present in this abomination makes absolutely no sense, or when it does, it’s the most eye-roll-inducing scene you’ll see in a long, long time.

From beginning to end, Catwoman is a movie that, while outrageously hilarious in every single way unintentionally, is extremely hard to sit through because of just how boring and cringy it is. If anything, the best way to watch this film would be to have a drinking game with friends: take a shot every time a terrible line of dialogue is said, or when there’s awful CGI, or when the acting is terrible.

Or… maybe you shouldn’t because then you’d probably get alcohol poisoning. The script from John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and John Rogers is absolutely atrocious and clearly doesn’t understand the Catwoman character whatsoever. There’s a reason why this character is so popular among DC Comics fans, and yet this film doesn’t give us any reason to love her.

Also, why did they feel the need to change her name from Selina Kyle to Patience Phillips? It almost seems like they wanted to do their own take on Catwoman but also not at the same time. It would be like making a Batman movie and then changing his name from Bruce Wayne to something like Mark Redford or something.

I think we can all agree that it’s a really good thing that superhero movies today are so much better than this because if we continuously got movies like Catwoman, there certainly wouldn’t be any DCEU or MCU today. What was going on back in the late 90s and early 2000s when comic book movies felt like outrageously cheap soap operas?

These are superhero characters for crying out loud. They shouldn’t feel like generic daytime television episodes you’d see your mom watching in the living room while drinking a cup of tea. Is that a weird comparison? Yes. But at the same time, I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Superhero movies today still have problems, don’t get me wrong (look at the current state of the once brilliant Marvel Cinematic Universe, for instance), but I think we can all agree that we are in a significantly better time for these kinds of movies than we were twenty years ago. I don’t think this generation would be able to survive another 90s and early 2000s superhero resurgence. At least the toys and merchandise was fun back then, though.

Catwoman is a mind-numbingly awful abomination, filled with awful dialogue, painfully bad CGI, and stiff acting that fails to understand the source material.