Catwoman

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Oh my god. This was the worst movie we have ever seen.

Let’s get the plot out of the way. There is this woman. Patience. She is a graphic designer for a cosmetics company. She somehow finds out that the cosmetics are addictive and damaging. Then while she runs away from the security, a cat burps on her face and she becomes a CGI Catwoman. For some reason the wife of the boss of the cosmetics company knows this and kills the boss and frames her. So now she jumps around until he gets the wife alone in a room and then kills her.

So 2004. What was going on? DC’s last movie was a fuck up. It was 1997’s Steel.  Marvel is winning. They made the Spidermans, Blade, X-men, Hulk, and some other shit. So DC probably thought that they should double their efforts. There are seven writers attached to this movie. One woman wrote a few series episodes but nothing too big. One guy wrote The Core in 2003. Another four wrote The Game with Michael Douglas and The Net with Sandra Bullock and a bunch of other good movies. Another wrote a few shitty TV series. Then there is the last guy, Bob Kane, that wrote the characters for the Nolan Batman and tons of DC shows. He really fucked up here. Catwoman was not the same Catwoman of the Batman franchise. She was not Selina Kyle and she was not in Gotham and not a cat-burglar. This was written to have nothing to do with the actual DC universe but retained the name Catwoman to attack some audience.

The Director was Pitof. His only other movie before this was Vidocq. A successful French sci-fi movie. He wouldn’t make another feature film after this movie. He seems to be known for visual effects. He worked on Alien 4 and a few other middle of the road movies.

Halle Berry was in Monster’s ball in 2001 and won all the awards. The she was in a James Bond movie as eye-candy. Then Gothika in 2003. Probably as eye-candy as well. Prior to these she was in good-ish movies with good-ish roles and she did well. How the hell did she manage to find this shit movie? Its not like she needed the money or had no other offers. She can be awesome if there’s a good director.

Sharon Stone wasn’t running out of work either. Her movies before this weren’t total shit-shows but they weren’t major hits either. Maybe this was a vanity project where she gets to show off her looks instead of working hard at her acting skill? Maybe she thought that only her looks can get her good movie reviews.

Benjamin Bratt was in a ton of good movies as ‘some third guy in charge that doesn’t really matter who the fuck he really is’. This movie got him closer to being a lead character. Too bad Ben.

It costs $100m to make this movie and it made about $82m back. That sounds ok but its still about $20m down the tubes and that doesn’t even account for the cost to market the movie to people. People always blame studio meddling when it comes to failed movies. No one really knows what could have been. Apparently this was tested with a small audience bore release and was so bad that it had to have reshoots. Maybe the studio knew its bad but wanted to at least be good enough to recover some of the $100m. Maybe the original cut would only have made $10m instead of $82?

Bad cast choice. Bad acting. Not an actual Catwoman movie. Bad, really bad CGI. Stupid story. Really obvious continuity mistakes. Bad dialogue. Bad photography. Fuck. Just don’t watch this shit OK?