I finally forced myself to sit through Halle Berry’s Catwoman which I’ve been told was terrible. After having given it a chance I’d like to share my thoughts.

The set-up made sense enough. A crooked beauty business leader has a product with awful side effects that he plans to release onto the market because profits are all that matter. A woman walks in on a meeting and suddenly must be dealt with as she knows too much. The businessman has a model wife, embittered by being replaced by a younger model but she wants the product to sell too.

For the origin story, Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is the woman that walks in on the dodgy meeting, gets killed and is revived by a magic cat called Midnight. It sounds weird but it’s not too far out given that it’s a superhero movie. Patience finds herself with cat-like senses and desires, she behaves a bit strangely which fits with the idea that she’s reborn as part cat. Patience seems to have a split personality after becoming Catwoman as she’s a socially nervous artist normally but a confident fighter in costume. She wields a whip, uses claws and jumps around a lot in combat. The attitude change could be the cat influence.

There’s a romance plot going on between Patience and a detective which involves a weird basketball dance for some reason. The way the romance plays out seems really contrived and none of the characters feel particularly likeable, whether it’s bad acting, a bad plot or bad script is hard to say.

Action of any kind doesn’t look very good in this film. The CGI (or whatever they used) doesn’t look right, sped up jumping ends up looking weird and they swap cameras a lot in some scenes which makes it a bit hard to watch. There’s one fight between Catwoman and her detective lover where it just seems quite sexualised for no real reason plus there’s a scene Catwoman dances with her whip for no real reason.

I didn’t get bored watching this movie which is good, it wasn’t gripping but my curiosity kept me glued. The acting and picture quality made it feel a bit like a low budget film that the studio didn’t care about. In truth, after seeing this movie and watching others with a Catwoman in I think this was made just to have Halle Berry walk around not wearing much. Definitely not very good but I have seen worse.

This means nothing really but it felt like the sort of bad romance film that my mum would like, not like a superhero type movie.