| 
Compiled by: Jack Foley
THE topsy-turvy careers of screen divas Halle Berry and Sharon
Stone took another blow, with the arrival of Catwoman, which has
been roundly slated by US critics.
The feline super-hero was viewed by many as a laughably preposterous
affair, which consistently fails to register on just about every
requirement - from acting to outfits, and from set pieces to special
effects.
Leading the fanfare of disapproval is Entertainment Weekly,
which lamented that ‘most of the movie has the cruddy lighting
and generic, death-by-franchise atmosphere of a third-rate spectacle
that's been worked over by too many hacks’.
While The Chicago Tribune cheekily dubbed it
‘the Showgirls of superhero movies’.
The Houston Chronicle, meanwhile, felt that
‘you'd never know Berry is an Oscar-winning actress - her
performance as Patience is downright amateurish’.
While the New York Times wrote: "Directed
by a Frenchman with a single, not uncatlike name of Pitof, Catwoman
is a howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless
style’.
|
 |
Furthering the Showgirls comparison,
the Hollywood Reporter opined that it ‘seems
destined to join Showgirls and its ilk as a fast-starting and
even faster-fading theatrical release that could enjoy an afterlife
as a midnight movie and video/DVD item where viewers supply alternate
dialogue’.
While the New York Post declared it to be ‘a
purr-fectly ridiculous and boring cat-astrophe’.
USA Today felt that ‘the screenplay is
flat and predictable, and bad dialogue prevails’.
And the Philadelphia Inquirer opined that it
is ‘awful adaptation of the comic-book character created
by Batman's Bob Kane’.
Worse still was Variety, which blasted that
it ‘plays like a Lifetime movie on estrogen overdose, barely
held together by a script that should have been tossed out with
the kitty litter’.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, dismissed
it, simply, as ‘silly and misfired’.
Of the few positives, the Los Angeles Times
stated that ‘not everybody will be able to swallow its heady
romanticism, yet its French director, Pitof, has brought sophistication
to a comic book sensibility’.
While Newsday hailed it for being ‘campy,
smart and dumb fun’.
But the negatives were kept up by Rolling Stone,
which felt that ‘the stench of the litter pan is all over
this big-screen $90 million disaster-in-waiting’.
And by Efilmcritic.com, which wrote: "Catwoman
looks and feels like something culled together by a committee
of greedy and inexperienced first-time producers. And horny 14-year-olds."
But the final word goes to Reelviews, which
seems to have summed it up by stating: "Despite its feline
pretensions, Catwoman belongs to another animal family - it's
either a dog or a turkey. Take your pick."
|
