The Cat without the Bat

Make no mistake, CATWOMAN is the character from the Batman comics - but not quite. And in this movie there's no Batman. But, if you liked the Batman flicks, you might enjoy this one.

The movie credits Bob Kane, inventor of the Batman comics, with the characters - phrased as a plural but the only one I recognize is Catwoman. The DVD includes an extensive featurette on all the women who have ever played Catwoman -- Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt from the old TV series, Lee Meriwether from the movie based on the TV series, Adrienne Barbeau who was the voice for the TV animated cartoon series, and Michelle Pfeiffer from the 1992 BATMAN RETURNS movie. But really, except for the Catwoman outfit, everything is changed.

In the comics and the 1992 movie, Catwoman was originally Selena Kyle, a nice young lady (an airline flight attendant in the 1930s comic book, an office drudge in the 1992 movie) who suffers a nearly fatal fall but survives with an entirely changed personality, becoming an accomplished jewel thief in a dominatrix costume.

Here, Halle Berry is Patience Phillips, an underappreciated advertising artist for the Hedare cosmetics giant. Trying to beat a deadline, she stumbles into a secret meeting where the company's chemist is trying to warn the boss that the company's new face cream is actually addictive and destructive. The boss orders his goons to kill Patience, and they nearly succeed, but she is revived by a mysterious cat that she recently rescued. She is suddenly endowed with incredible gymnastic skill and speed. The mysterious cat leads her to its owner, an eccentric cat lady (Frances Conroy, familiar as the mother on Six Feet Under) who tells Patience that she has been transformed into a catwoman, one of many women so transformed (the photos of other catwomen include Michelle Pfieffer from the 1992 Batman movie, so we can understand that this is not the same Catwoman). Patience returns to her apartment to launch a crusade to find and punish whoever it was who tried to kill her, and as she untangles the mystery, also prevent the marketing of the poisonous face cream. In the course of her purr-suit of justice, this cat crosses the path of a handsome police detective, Benjamin Bratt (formerly of Law & Order), and engages in a cat fight with the wife of Hedare boss, Sharon Stone (who pretty much steals the show).

The special effects are, of course, the real star of the show. The director, Jean-Christophe Camar, better known simply as Pitof, was primarily a visual effects supervisor on a bunch of movies, most of them French but including The Messenger and Alien Resurrection. In a few sequences it is clear that we are not watching Halle Berry jumping around but rather a computer generated image, but I don't know if that means the image was poorly done or just because the leaping was so clearly impossible.

This isn't Shakespear, you are not looking for finely tuned dialogue or challenging plots. This is pure escapism. Fortunately Halle Berry and Sharon Stone are on everyones' lists of Women Who Are Not Especially Ugly, so this movie can be fun to watch. And there's a possibility of a sequel.