Catwoman isn’t bad because it’s not about the comics’ Catwoman – a prostitute-turned-cat-burglar-with-a-heart-of-gold named Selina Kyle – but because the replacement, an ad-designer-turned-cat-burglar-with-a-heart-of-gold named Patience Phillips is such a big dull dud. The luminous Halle Berry, making the fastest stransformation from Oscar winner to potential Razzie winner in history (and rest assured, she will be nominated), looks great in her slinky costume but the problem with these damn talking pictures is you’ve got to talk in them too. Talking is not something Catwoman has mastered.

Patience works for cosmetics magnates George and Laurel Hedare (Lambert Wilson and Sharon Stone). Their new skincare product Bioline is about to be released when Patience accidentally walks into a clandestine midnight meeting where several Hedare employees are discussing its terrible side effects: headaches, nausea, and, oh yeah, complete epidermal destruction. Patience is murdered by some goons, then revived as a cat-powered adventuress by a mystical feline named Midnight. Later, Patience learns the extent of her newfound abilities and the history of the Catwoman “legacy” from Midnighter’s handler Ophelia (Frances Conroy). It involves ancient Egyptian gods and a line of catwomen traceable through history. In practice, Patience’s powers involve lots of obvious CGI and leaping around in a manner that more resembles an arachnid than a cat. If it all sounds familiar, the concept is ripped off wholesale from a dreadful Italian superhero flick named The Pumaman, in which an archaeology professor wears a fashion nightmare costume and gains vaguely puma-related powers from ancient alien Aztec gods. In keep with that source material (the “inspired by comics by Bob Kane” is theoretical at best), Patience dons a leather fetishized catsuit, and foils crimes that get in the way of her own interests in thievery.

Investigating the case, and others that tangentially relate to Catwoman, is Detective Tom Lone a man with Benjamin Bratt's good looks and the brains of a pet rock. Tom meets Patience on a window ledge where she's trying to save a cat and he's trying to pick her up on a date. She misses their coffee date (not her fault, she was dead at the time) and then apologizes by bringing him a cup of java with the word "Sorry!" written on the side. Later, Catwoman returns some jewels she stole in a brown paper bag with the same message scrawled on the side. Here are two women of the same height, weight, curveatious build, skin color, and lips, and Lone has no clue that they may be one person. Patience's awkward attempts to preserve her secret identity make Clark Kent's glasses look like a Mission: Impossible mask in comparison.

Catwoman is terrible all right, but it's only entertainingly terrible in scenes like these, where Lone can't figure out that his girlfriend is Catwoman, or when Stone reveals that when Bioline isn't destroying your skin it makes it "as hard as marble." How does that work? How can something destroy your flesh and make it impervious to harm?

The director is a dude name Pitof, and if you add an "s" between the "i" and the "t" of his name you'll get a phonetic spelling of the proper emotional response to Catwoman. The whole experience, with lots of narrative jerks and glaring continuity gaffes, reeks of reshooting and post-production tinkering. Keep your eye on Patience's costume in the early scenes, a blue and leopard print top. She wears it to work one day and then returns home, goes to sleep, wakes up and… wears it again? No one wears the same outfit to work two days in a row; hell in most Hollywood movies no one wears the same outfit for more than two consecutive scenes. It's clear the chronology was fiddled with for some reason.