Wednesday 9 November 2016

Catwoman (2004)



Patience Phillips is a timid graphic designer who accidentally discovers that her employer's new product is dangerously toxic.  She gets murdered for her trouble, but is mysteriously brought back to life by an Egyptian Mau cat.  Now blessed with feline-themed superpowers, she sets out to expose the people who murdered her.

So this film is notorious for its awfulness.  It won no less than four "Golden Raspberry" awards.  Halle Berry even turned up to collect hers in person.  It must therefore be a complete train wreck of a movie, right?

Well ... not really.

Now Catwoman is in no way a good film.  I'm certainly not saying that.  For instance, it introduces themes - "the Catwoman is an eternal paragon of female independence, passed down through the ages!" - and then just kinda forgets about them shortly thereafter.  And whenever it tries to be funny, it more-or-less embarrasses itself.  The final showdown with the villain also features some of the lamest superhero battle banter ever written.

But the simple fact is that it's not the extravaganza of terribad that you've probably heard.  Zombie Hunter is a terrible film.  As is Scavengers.  Or Grizzly Rage.  Anyone who thinks Catwoman deserves its opprobrium simply doesn't know how pee-filled the cinematic gene pool gets when you're down in the shallow end.

In actual fact, Catwoman is merely pedestrian and mediocre.  Now that's certainly pretty inexcusable from a $100 million film starring an Oscar winner, and it means I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it doesn't put it anywhere close to the same shameful category as the three films listed above (and frankly, I've seen worse even than them, in my time).

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