AllMovie

Even with its hyperactive visuals and sexy leading lady, Catwoman is a clunky wall of noise that fails to deliver one ounce of the exciting spirit needed to make a slam-bam slice of entertainment that audiences will connect with. Never mind its shoddy re-imagining of the character, this film does the worst thing that a comic book film can do -- be bland. There's zero life to its characters, while the action literally attacks your eyes in a brutal splash of effects that leaves viewers fumbling for their aspirin, rather than hooting and hollering in their seat. It's also hard to shake Michelle Pfeiffer's indelible mark on the feline seductress in Batman Returns, which actually strayed just as much away from the source material as this film, though her wicked sass and sultry cool are miles above anything that Halle Berry manages to pull off. The rest of the cast is just as weak, starting with the large and spunky sidekick all the way to the Benjamin Bratt character, who besides being a handy policeman that the writers (all four of them) can magically plop in at every police call in the film, ends up being such an obvious ingredient in the mix that he might as well be a cardboard cutout on the set. The much-hyped return of Sharon Stone sees the glamorous star looking quite stunning once again, but her performance is uneven, missing the mark consistently on how over-the-top she needs to be all the way until the end, where she turns into her own rock-hard super-powered billionairess (wrap your head around that one!). In the end, it's not the actors that should be reprimanded, but the screenwriters and man at the helm, Pitof. Longtime collaborator of acclaimed director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Pitof brings a wild eye to the material, but more often than not, his approach is heavy-handed and simply too much. How many swooping, sped-up shots of this glassy city does one actually need? His reliance on computer graphics is also a major blow to the production, giving the atrocious CG Catwoman almost more screen time than Halle Berry herself! While not the train wreck that many are expecting, Catwoman is still a soulless exercise in banality that just does not deliver the goods.