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# Meee-ouch! Catwoman misses the litter box
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/meee-ouch-catwoman-misses-the-litter-box/
- Published: 2004-07-23T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T04:45:46.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Entertainment, Malibu, #archive-import

*By DANIEL DUNN Special to the Daily Press*

The compulsion to make a kitty litter box joke is damn near too powerful to resist, but that would be an affront to decent feline bowel movements the world over. Suffice to say sitting through “Catwoman,” which stars a reeling Academy Award-winning actress in serious need of a stern talking to (and a new agent), is about as pleasant an experience as staying up all night listening to alley-cats in heat. All right, maybe not ITALS>that<END bad. After all, it isn’t every movie that you get to see Halle Berry strut around like a pointy-eared bondage diva while aging sexpot Sharon Stone tosses the last shovel-full of dirt over her lifeless career. Plus, Benjamin Bratt’s perennial “Why the hell didn’t I do ‘Miss Congeniality 2’ instead?” face is quite amusing.

From the outset, “Catwoman” teeters precariously atop a mountain of implausibilities. We’re asked to believe Patience Phillips (Berry) is an uninteresting dweeb despite considerable evidence to the contrary. It’s one thing to buy into the dubious character set-up - ignoring Patience’s obvious good looks, designer wardrobe, job at esteemed cosmetics company and hip pad - but all reason gets spit out like a hairball when she’s whacked after discovering that her ruthless bosses (Stone and Lambert Wilson) are threatening humankind with poisonous skin care products. Again, they’re threatening humankind with poisonous skin care products. This begs the question, when did Malibu Barbie start writing screenplays?

So a magical Egyptian Mau named Midnight breathes life back into Patience, and the reanimated version likes to dress up in leather, do karate and scratch. Offered as a feminist hero, Catwoman instead panders to the basest male fantasies: A bull-whip-wielding hellcat who cannot resist the hunky cop (Bratt), and loves to show some ass while she’s kicking it. Berry seems wholly out of sorts the entire movie, which may be partly attributable to her highly publicized split with crooner Eric Benet during production. Or maybe she just isn’t all that good, after all. Sure there’s “Monster Ball,” but then there’s “Die Another Day,” “Gothika” and now this.

The director is a Frenchman named Pitof who’s been hailed as a visual effects wizard. Hard to tell if he is, though, because everything in the film moves too quickly, like it was shot and edited by a crack fiend with ADD. Pitof is determined not to let our attention settle on anything for more than an instant. Try as he might, however, there’s no distracting us from clearly seeing that this movie sucks. Meee-ouch! (Rated PG-13 for action violence and some sensuality.)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 23, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/072304.pdf?ref=smdp.com)