Midway through Clayface, our antihero protagonist Matt Hagen celebrates his renewed celebrity status by engaging in a rousing game of pick-up basketball. The scene sends a shiver down the spines of moviegoers, and not just because it ends with Hagen discovering his regeneration powers, which will eventually lead him down the path of evil. It scares us because we’ve already watched a Batman villain use their powers to play basketball in a movie. And that movie was terrible.The movie, of course, was 2004’s Catwoman. The scene, of course, found artist Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) encountering Detective Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) playing street ball shortly after her cat powers kicked in, which allow her to… bounce the ball rapidly between her hands? The basketball scene is just one of many inexplicably terrible scenes in Catwoman, and its connection to Clayface is a welcome reminder of just how far the superhero genre has come.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Development Hell HereThese days, when Joker, Clayface, and even Kraven the Hunter get feature films, a movie about Catwoman makes perfect sense. She may have debuted as a burglar called the Cat in 1940’s Batman #1, but she was still a supporting character in someone else’s story. Even in the ‘90s, when she got her first solo ongoing series, she was still seen as a niche character, one who could interest devoted comic book readers, but not a wider audience. Still, Michelle Pfeiffer’s searing take in 1992’s Batman Returns was enough to get Warner Bros. to consider a Catwoman film, spinning out of the enormously successful mainline Batman franchise.The first version of the movie went into production almost immediately after Batman Returns, with Tim Burton signing on to direct and Pfeiffer planning to reprise her role, alongside screenwriter Daniel Waters. Waters conceived something off-beat and very much in Burton’s wheelhouse, a story in which Selina Kyle leaves Gotham to recuperate in a resort town called Oasisburg, which is run by male superheroes. But when the heroes indulge in their toxic masculinity, Kyle must become Catwoman again to fight back.Compelling as the idea sounds, Warner Bros. wasn’t interested in an off-beat tale, especially after the mixed reception to Batman Forever. And so, the project remained in limbo while the studio tinkered. First, they lost Pfeiffer, who dropped out to pursue other opportunities. Then Ashley Judd signed on for a while before falling away. Finally, the studio landed on Halle Berry, who wanted a franchise picture after her James Bond spinoff Jinx went south. As much as Berry took the blame for the many problems in the movie, her casting wasn’t where Catwoman went wrong. Some of the blame definitely falls on the various screenwriters, including the trio who finally end up with the final credit—John Brancato, Michael Ferris, and John Rogers. But the ultimate blame falls on the man hired to hold the thing together, the mononymic French special effects artist turned director, Pitof.Nine Lives LostTo be fair, Catwoman has a terrible story. Gone is all the set-up from Batman Returns, in which mousy secretary Selina Kyle learns to roar after being revived by her cats, who bring her back to life when her evil boss Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) pushes her out of a window. Gone is her flirtation with Batman (Michael Keaton), a fellow weirdo who loves to wear black leather and hang out on rooftops.Instead, Berry plays Patience Phillips, a nondescript artsy-type who works in the advertising department of cosmetics company Hedare Beauty, owned by George Hedare (Lambert Wilson) and his wife Laurel (Sharon Stone). Laurel is pushing a new skin rejuvenation product, certain to make her rich, as long as the public never hears about its horrible side-effects. When Laurel catches Patience overhearing a particularly damning conversation with one of her scientists, she drowns our hero, leaving her body to wash out to sea. However, when she washes back on shore, Patience is visited by the mystic cat Midnight, who not only revives her, but gives her cat powers of being very agile and wearing skimpy outfits.As Catwoman, Patience seeks revenge on Laurel, who is killing anyone who stands in the way of her new product. Catwoman finds an ally in Detective Lone, who helps her escalate her crusade against Laurel, and in Ophelia Powers (Frances Conroy), who explains that the Egyptian god Bast has chosen Catwomen throughout history (giving the movie its one nod to Pfeiffer).The film climaxes with Catwoman confronting Laurel in the cosmetic company offices, where she learns the truth about the side-effects: using the treatment for too long creates unbreakable, diamond-hard skin, not unlike Emma Frost of the X-Men. Reveling in her invincibility, Laurel attacks Catwoman, nearly defeating her. However, Catwoman’s Bast-powered claws does allow her to scratch at Laurel’s face. So when the two tumble out of a window and dangle above the ground, Laurel chooses death after seeing her face in the reflection, unable to think about life as an ugly person.It’s a silly story, to be sure, and there’s more than a whiff of sexism in the “girls like make-up” nature of the plot. But in the right hands, Catwoman could be good campy fun, a movie that truly embraces its comic book roots. Instead, Catwoman is in the hands of a French director with art film aspirations.A Catspaw CreationEvery single comic book movie from the 2000s suffers from terrible special effects: Wolverine whipping around Magneto in X-Men, Spider-Man turning into rubber to swing through New York, the Hulk as Shrek in Hulk. But even by that standard, Catwoman looks terrible, precisely because of the way Pitof and his team choose to shoot the movie.Nothing demonstrates that better than Catwoman’s requisite coming out scene, when Patience realizes that she has powers, puts on an early version of her suit, and takes to the night. She first hops on a motorcycle to buzz through the streets, which Pitof chooses to convey via a grab bag of frenetic cuts, blur effects, and extreme close-ups, all jumbled together to form an illegible blob. She arrives at a jewelry store to stare lustily at a necklace. But upon realizing that a group of thugs have already broken in to burgle the place, Catwoman leaps into action, slinking along the walls and flipping around the baddies. Pitof moves his camera around the action to get every angle of the gangly CG model standing in for the hero, but cuts fast and frequently when real actors are in the shot, never giving us a sense of how she and the villains share the space.The visual approach doesn’t just render the action impossible to follow. It makes Berry and Stone, who gets fight scenes at the end of the movie, look utterly ridiculous. Of course, both actresses were heavily mocked at the time for their work on the film. But upon closer inspection, it’s clear that they, and most of the cast, know exactly what they’re doing. Berry vamps her way through every scene, giving a knowing wink to the camera and utterly committing herself to the role of an over-the-top sexy superheroine. Stone delivers her lines in the tradition of Terrance Stamp’s Zod or Jack Nicholson’s Joker, theatrical and imperious. They know what kind of movie they’re in and they give themselves to it. Pitof, his cinematographer and editors, do not, and they undermine the film with their incompetent pretensions. After all, this is a group who couldn’t even shoot a simple pick up basketball game without endless cuts and ostentatious camera movements, no matter how much Berry and Bratt tried to make the moment work.No one would argue that supervillain movies have been great since Catwoman; Clayface is a blast, and the Venom films have their defenders. But supervillain movies have never been worse than Catwoman, a film that turned a lay-up of an IP into the most embarrassing airball.The post Revisiting Catwoman, DC’s First and Worst Villain Solo Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.