Since debuting in 1940’s Batman #1, Catwoman has been one of the most important characters in the Dark Knight’s saga.
She’s been an enemy and an ally, a teammate and a lover, and they’ve even been married. With all that history, it’s no surprise that she’s stepped off the comics page and into live action more than any other Batman villain, including the Joker.
But much like Batman himself, Catwoman hasn’t always had the best luck with those performances. So from iconic costumes and purr-fect portrayals all the way down to a weird fixation on having a woman get licked back to life by actual alleycats, here’s every live-action Catwoman ranked from worst to best.
Halle Berry – Catwoman (2004)
Saying 2004’s Catwoman isn’t a very good movie is sort of like saying that being punched in the mouth isn’t a very good breakfast. It’s a film that fails on every conceivable level, from an insultingly bad plot that pits one of DC’s most prominent female characters against evil makeup and a woman who’s mad that she’s starting to look old—because that’s what women want to see in a heroine, right?—to a costume redesign that makes one of the most beautiful women in the world look like she lost a fight with a paper shredder.
And what isn’t bad is just incomprehensible. Even if audiences were up for accepting that Patience Porter is meowed back to life by a badly animated CGI cat—which, if we’re being honest with each other, isn’t that much dumber than being bitten by a radioactive spider—it’s a lot harder to deal with the movie’s constant attempts to make her catlike in an excruciatingly literal sense. She hisses at dogs, orders a saucer of cream at a bar, and bats around a basketball like it’s made of yarn before dunking on Benjamin Bratt. The only thing audiences should be happy about with this movie is that she didn’t start scratching around in a litterbox, although It does make you wonder why Sharon Stone didn’t just pull out a laser pointer to keep Catwoman distracted while she went through with her evil plan.
And the worst part? It could’ve worked. Despite the Golden Raspberry sitting on her shelf—which she had the sense of humor to accept in person—Berry also has an Academy Award, and is well acquainted with how to pull off a role in a blockbuster superhero movie. With some better material to work with, she could’ve pulled it off. Instead, we had a script that had at least 14 credited writers and a star that knew it was going to be a bad movie, meaning this thing was doomed from the start.
(Excerpt) Read More at: Looper.com