I'm dreading Wednesday's release of Catwoman. Despite Halle Berry and Sharon Stone, I fear this has a two-hour Mary Jane smell to it. That's Mary Jane as in the rewritten-badly character of Mary Jane from the Spiderman movies.
Pulchritude aside, what will there be to recommend the movie for? The costume is one of the most ridiculous costumes ever assembled. Every still of Berry wearing it has her leaning back so the suspenders on the front don't billow out. The pants are ugly and the mask/cowl is just plain ugleeeeeee. But hey, Catwoman has changed costumes so many times in the past, it probably isn't fair to single out this Mr. Blackwell dream for condemnation for just being different. Did I mention it's ugly?
But why change Selina Kyle into Prudence something or other? Kyle has been many things in her comic/tv career. A socialite, a thief, an adventurer, a prostitute, a good girl and a bad girl. But she's always been Selina Kyle. This time, she's dead and come back and I don't care. Coming on the heels of what Will Smith et al did to the good Doctor Asimov with the I, Robot butchering, I'm thinking creator rights need a revisit by the big screenwriter in the sky. Please stop them before they revise and rewrite again.
Just an aside, if Akiva Goldsman hadn't somehow penned A Beautiful Mind, would he go down in history as the worst screenwriter ever? Besides 'rewriting' I, Robot, he also penned the two last Batman flicks and Lost in Space, just to mention three other genre films that define dreck. And here's something chilling to consider. He is going to adapt The DaVinci Code for the big screen. Another Raise the Titanic? Probably.
If you are looking for some eye-candy and fancy wire-work fighting, save the big bucks and go rent So Close. This is a Hong Kong mutation of Charlie's Angels and The Punisher. It stars Qi Shu and Vicky Zhao as sisters who make work as top-drawer assassins. Qi is the Asian beauty who helped make The Transporter so watchable. (Yeah, THAT movie would be an even BETTER bet to rent). Qi and Zhao are sort of good girl assassins, who spend the first part of the movie taking out really bad dudes, while leaving their underlings living and cursing their leg wounds.
That action runs them afoul of the police, including Karen Mok, who seems to transmute from CSI lab-rat to Detective mid-movie. She takes up an almost solo chase of the other two babes, helped only occasionally by her geeky partner (who also makes the career leap). She gets close and then REALLY close to the Zhao character and ends up on the side of the angels against the bad guys. You can guess who wins.
This is a goofy movie that has some first-rate martial arts action. The scene where Qi and Mok go at it while handcuffed is worth the rental. Beyond that, if you are a living, breathing, red-blooded male, the eye candy is top drawer. If you don't expect much more from this flick, you'll have an enjoyable couple of hours.
Probably a better time than you'll have sitting in a theatre watching Catwoman and asking, "I spend HOW MUCH tonight?"
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