Warner Brothers studios released the "big screen" version of Cat Woman staring Halle Berry in 2004/2005. The movie was slaughtered by critics and even Halle herself has taken to expressing shame for having done the movie. I like action movies, really like sci-fi movies and love sci-fi-action movies. For me, the fighting sequences in sci-fi movies are the best because they aren't just regular fight scenes, they defy the laws of physics. I can enjoy a sci-fi movie in spite of not understanding it or even if the movie or writing is senseless, if the action is plentiful and magnificent. It is for this reason that I am one of the few who liked the Cat Woman movie. Halle-the-sexy, in a scant, tight, leather outfit, flipping and twisting all about - that's what's up! I can guarantee you that everyone with a fetish for women with sexy feet, own a copy of the movie because she did a large portion of it barefoot. The action sequences were great, in my opinion - they resembled the action sequences in the Blade trilogies. In spite of the fact that I was able to overlook the flaws in this movie, the movie was indeed thoroughly flawed. I completely understand why it received such bad reviews although I think they went too far.
In order for a sci-fi movie to garner mass appeal, it has to either go to the level of the "Matrix" where it involves effects, or have an extremely well written and executed script accompanied by a plausible plot that does not take details for granted. The Cat Woman movie did neither. Sci-Fi/Action movie fans will forgive a poor script or non-plausible plot in exchange for really good effects. Drama lovers will tolerate sci-fi unrealistic sequences and shocking action in exchange for a movie that would be good even without them. The happy medium was never struck with this movie.
I recently watched this movie again, note pad in hand, and noted every flaw as the movie progressed. What I found was that there were tons of little things, which in concert represent a gigantic whole in the movie.
HALLE'S NARRATION
The movie opens and closes with Halle Berry providing narration. Halle does not have the voice for narration. Although it was nice that the narration was only at the beginning and end - they should have hired a narrator.
HALLE AS THE UNATTRACTIVE OFFICE WORKER
Halle Berry is at a level of beauty where the only way to sell her as unattractive would be to call all the way and make her a crack head, as they did in "Jungle Fever". Trying to make it appear that no one noticed that she was beautiful was just odd. They should have made her position in the office more substantial and not tried to play down her beauty. The only benefit to playing down her looks in the movie was to support the contrast between Halle as the innocent victim and Halle as the Cat Woman. It really wasn't worth it to me. The Cat Woman was so extreme a character that Halle as the office worker could afford to be an average good looking and successful woman, at the least.
HALLE GOES OUT ON WINDOW CEIL AFTER A CAT
The first unrealistic scene in the movie was Halle going out of her window to save a cat that wasn't hers and apparently wasn't afraid at all. Later in the movie this was explained as a test the cat was putting Halle through to determine if she was worthy of receiving Cat Woman powers. Not only was it not plausible that an intelligent person would do such a thing but it was a ridiculous test for receiving super-hero powers.
DETECTIVE LONE SAVES HALLE FROM THE WINDOW CEIL
Immediately after Halle gets trapped on the window ceil, standing on a collapsing air conditioner, her eventual love-interest, detective Lone, is introduced. He just happened to be driving by when he noticed her and mistook her for someone attempting suicide so he stopped and tried to negotiate her down. That part is all plausible until the air conditioner finally gives way and Halle is now in imminent danger. Detective Lone yells to her asking for her apartment number, runs through the building, kicks in her door and catches her in the nic-of-time. The conflict with this scene could have easily been resolved by stretching out the time it took for the air conditioner to collapse but since it collapsed almost immediately, it was visually and intellectually insulting to see how fast he reached her.
HALLE LEAVES HER APARTMENT BAREFOOT & THE DOOR IS REPAIRED
It was very clear that when Halle went out of the window, she was barefoot and after being rescued, the next sequence of events were unbroken and at no point did she put on shoes. Halle realizes after being rescued that she's late for work and grabs her coat. She rushes out of the apartment without putting on shoes, slamming the door behind herself, the door that was kicked in by the detective and presumably, damaged. When she is shown at work, the fact that she should not be wearing shoes was not addressed nor did she show any concern for the fact that she left her apartment door not secure.
DETECTIVE LONE LOCATES HALLE'S WORK PLACE
In her rush to get to work, Halle drops her wallet in the hallway. Detective Lone retrieves it and tracks her down at her job to return it. The only issue with this is that there was no explanation for how her located her. They could have simply had a shot of him finding a business card in her wallet or some other simple thing but this was one of many small things that was taken for granted in this movie.
HALLE DELIVERS AD DESIGN TO LAB
Halle is working late on an ad she designed and had to redesign for her obnoxious boss but the carrier doesn't arrive to pick it up. She is forced to deliver the design herself. She delivers the design to the companies research and development lab? I did not understand this at all. Why would the designs for a magazine ad for the company's product, go to their R&D lab? They used this sequence to explain why Halle was killed by the company - because she overheard and saw information that could ruin the company. It seems to me that this could have been as easily accomplished by having her stumble into a secret meeting between the scientist and the villain seeing as she was already in the office, working late and had a reason to seek out a superior to explain why the design might be delivered late.
HALLE GETS PASSED THE LAB'S SECURITY
When Halle gets to the lab, there is a guard posted out front who must have just let her in because the immediate cut-away scene from him is one of Halle ringing the lab's doorbell trying to gain entrance. When no one responds to the buzzer she walks to the side of the building and walks right into a door marked "Restricted Access". The door isn't locked?! She then strolls through the facility, unrestricted, no alarms sounding, no guards watching monitors, none of the interior doors having access controls. Just a reminder - this is supposedly an R&D lab! She stumbles her way into a secret meeting where she overhears what she shouldn't, is discovered and then security is alerted. Security, all of a sudden becomes plentiful.
HALLE IS SHOT AT BY SECURITY WITHIN THE LAB
Security pursues Halle through the facility, which she seems to have full access to negotiate her way through. Security aren't trying to capture what they believe to be an intruder, they're trying to kill her! Why they were trying to kill her was never explained but they were so vicious that they were opening fire within a multimillion dollar R&D lab - bullets striking pressure pipes and releasing gasses and everything! Made no sense.
HALLE'S BODY WASHES UP IN AN UNLIKELY PLACE
Halle gets trapped in the lab's sewage system and the security guys flush her out of it into a lake where she drowns. Her body presumably washes up, but doesn't end up on the shore of the lake but rather, on a raised, dry plane. It is here that she is surrounded by cats and resurrected as Cat Woman. Perhaps the flaw in this scene could have been forgiven and probably wouldn't have even been noticed were it not for the numerous flaws in the preceding scenes.
HALLE WAKES UP CLEAN
After having been flushed out of waste pipes, drowned in a virtual cesspool, washed up on a muddy land covered in cats, Halle is pretty damn dirty. She awakens at the lake with animalistic senses and you can tell that there is a little bit of cat within by the way she moves as she heads home. She lurks through the streets as though someone is following her and appears to try to stay in the shadows. It appears that there's someone new occupying her body - someone not used to it - someone part animal. That's all good because I'm sure that's exactly what they were trying to communicate in the scene. When she gets home, she enters through the window by punching out the glass - an animalistic attitude and also the attitude of someone who does completely feel ownership of the property. Then, the next scene is Halle waking up the next day, already freshly showered and in clean clothing. I thought to myself when I saw this scene, why is it that she was too untamed to enter the building like a regular person but tame enough to shower and change clothes before going to bed"? One really nice then about the wake-up scene was that she was asleep on raised shelving which she fell from in surprise.
THE CAT-NIP BALL
The next scene of issue is the scene in which Halle meets a former Cat Woman for the first time. Former Cat Woman tests Halle by tossing a Cat Nip ball at her to gauge her response. Halle, of course, responds like a cat and rolls the thing all around her nose, curiously. Were it not for the numerous flaws in the script and plot up to this point in the movie, this would have just been a cute scene that gave the audience a moment of good humor. Because of the flawed scenes that led up to this one, it had the appeal of just another tacky flaw.
CAT WOMAN'S "BAD-ASS" LINES
Every super-hero and villain as well, has 'bad-ass' lines. Bad-ass lines are lines like, "I'll be back," from the Terminator movie, or, "Say hello to my little friend," from Scarface. Most of Cat Woman's bad-ass lines were corny. Bad-ass lines are usually followed by a bad-ass act. Cat Woman's bad-ass lines weren't always followed by a substantial bad-ass act and sometimes, unnecessary. The cool affect of the bad-ass line was taken lightly and abused in this movie.
CAT WOMAN STEALS A MOTORCYCLE
Cat Woman decides to go burglarize a jewelry store. For transportation, she steals a motorcycle that's parked in the alley at her apartment. She doesn't hotwire or jimmy the ignition, she just gets on it and drives off with some guy yelling in the background. What!?
CAT WOMAN SEEKS OUT HER KILLER(S)
When Cat Woman realizes that she was killed before being resurrected, she decides to seek out her killer(s) for revenge. It had already been established by this point in the movie that she couldn't remember the who, what, when, where or why's of her death but when she goes on a hunt through the city to find her killers, she ends up going directly to a club where she finds one of the security people who shot at her and flushed her out of the sewage pipes. She remembers his face when she sees him. It seems to me that it would have far more reasonable to just allow her to recall her memories. Cat Woman, dressed as Cat Woman, walks right into the club behind the security guy. This isn't a strip club and there isn't some kind of Halloween party going on so it looks pretty odd. No one but the audience seems to notice that she's out of place and wonders how she got in, in the first place. She even orders a glass of 'cream' without getting a strange look from the bartender. Then, after she beats up the security guy for information, he just simply tells her everything she needs to know. This is a guy who shoots first as evidenced by how she died but he gets kicked a few times by a girl in leather and he spills every bean in the bag! Why would he do that? Even if he wanted to tell her something to stop the ass kicking - why wouldn't he have just told lies?
DETECTIVE LONE STILL HAS THE COFFEE CUP
In the movie, Halle brings the detective a cup of coffee in a styrophone cup with the word "sorry" written on it. She missed a coffee date with him the day after she was killed and this was her way of making up with him. A day or so later, the detective noticed the commonality between the handwriting on the cup and the handwriting on a bag left by the person who robbed a jewelry store. He had the handwriting compared by a specialist who determined that they were written by two completely different people. What the scene is supposed to establish firmly is that Halle is now two different people, one of which is docile and the other is dangerous. The problem is that both the samples were written by Halle when she was in character as the docile personality. The writing on the cup was clearly done by the non-hero persona. The day after Cat Woman robbed the jewelry store, the docile persona wakes up next to her bed which is covered in jewelry and shamefully and secretly returns it to the store in a bag with the word "sorry" written on it and accompanied by a box of muffins. There's a slip like this one in every movie but a movie with this many problems can't afford it.
DETECTIVE LONE ISN'T REMOVED FROM THE CAT WOMAN CASE
Detective Lone discovers that Halle is Cat Woman the night he sleeps with her. The following day, he takes her into custody, takes her to jail and interrogates her. Not only is this unlikely seeing as he has a personal relationship with her but even if he was hiding this fact to not have the case taken from him, she blurted it out during the interrogation. At no point did their relationship represent any conflict of interest for him. This was just a lazy slip.
CAT WOMAN ESCAPES JAIL BUT STILL HAS HER OUTFIT
When Halle is taken into custody by detective Lone, she has her Cat Woman outfit in a bag she's carrying. When she escapes jail by jumping from a very high window and landing on her feet (Very Cool!), she is almost hit by a Jaguar vehicle (Also, very cool!) which she steals but not before she says a corny bad-ass line and throws the guy from the vehicle. No where in the sequence of scenes involving her escape from jail does she recover her bag and it is clear when she lands from the jump from the window that there is no bag. None-the-less, she goes out after the people who framed her, again dressed as Cat Woman.
The movie closes wrong as well. The movie closes with Halle narrating a letter which detective Lone is reading. The letter is basically her break-up letter. Not only did it not make sense that she would break up with the guy but once again it was Halle doing the narrating.
There ya go - a number of the reasons that Halle Berry didn't do Cat Woman justice. As you can see, it had a lot less to do with Halle than it had to do with the script, direction and editing by the movie makers. Halle has to take her share of the blame because actors have the ability to protest bad direction and scripts.
