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BY TOM MEEK
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In Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer was the frumpy secretary who’s licked back to life by a horde of cats and reborn with a sassy new attitude and feline powers. Here, Oscar winner Halle Berry is handed a feature-sized version of that subplot, but instead of pushing paper, her demure Patience Philips works as a graphics grunt at a cosmetics conglomerate run by Laurel and George Hedare (Sharon Stone and Lambert Wilson). The corporation has come up with a revolutionary anti-aging cream and is planning to push it onto the market regardless of its lethal side effects. Patience gets caught up in the cover-up and winds up dead — that is, until an Egyptian mau brings her back to life so she can leap around in skimpy leather outfits, flirt with the hot cop on her case (Benjamin Bratt), and exact revenge on her former employers. French visual-FX expert Pitof directs, so the overuse of CGI is understandable, though even that can’t conceal the insipid plot or Berry’s ham-fisted performance. The real nuggets of joy in this otherwise messy kitty litter are Wilson as the smarmy corporate head and Stone as the aging beauty queen with a complexion that’s hard as steel. (104 minutes)
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