Cat Woman (2004)

Directed by: Pitof | 97 minutes | action, fantasy | Actors: Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, Sharon Stone, Lambert Wilson, Alex Borstein, Michael Massee, Byron Mann, Frances Conroy, Kim Smith

Cinderella becomes action heroine in whiskey commercial: it all applies to ‘Catwoman’. It certainly is advertising, but not for the film.

Only through children’s eyes is ‘Catwoman’ worth it. Good and bad are fairytale-like far apart and the plot could have belonged to Bassie and Adriaan. Girl (Berry) nearly falls off the windowsill trying to save a cat and is rescued herself by a cop (Bratt). She uses all the clichés to get her, has muscles and also loves children, but she is in a hurry because she has to go to work. She tries so hard and yet she is humiliated by her boss (the kind of villain from childhood movies).

That calls for revenge, but if you’re a good person like Patience Phillips, providence must help you. It exists in the form of the cat, which according to the ancient Egyptians has divine gifts. Patience gets that too, as in ‘Batman Returns’.

The prologue pays some attention to the historical backgrounds of the cat cult and there is an interlude explaining that all women have two faces (caring and wild: nice to know), but the commercial for leather suits must continue and cat lady Berry jumps on again, on the hunt for angry stepmother Stone, after a good restart in ‘If These Walls Could Talk’ now ends up on the margins of the film industry again. Stone’s role as a fashion model dumped for a young blossom calls for parody. They try – her skin is marble because of the ointment – ​​but she wants too much and takes herself too seriously. Berry and Stone’s dialogues (“You’re that cat who killed Slavicky!”) beg for a Raspberry Award; the beautiful Halle also has great difficulty playing a shy breekeleg.

Idea poverty reigns in ‘Catwoman’. The film offers some visual spectacle – director Pitof’s specialty – and is certainly fun for children, but was that the intention of the years of searching for the ideal cast and the endlessly rewritten scripts?