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"Catwoman" (2004) is a strange movie. Its title character isn't a jewel thief who prowls with cat-like stealth. She's a woman who's actually part cat!

Catwoman is infamous for the moment when its star, Halle Berry, was given a "Razzie" award - a sort of anti-Oscar - for the worst performance of 2004. This was unprecedented because Berry had received a real "Best Actress" Oscar the year before - and because she gamely agreed to show up at the Razzie ceremony and accept their humiliating honor. She delivered the movie's ultimate epitaph in a warning to her agent. "Next time, read the script first!"

The problem with the movie was its screenwriters abandoned the familiar Selena Kyle character from "Batman Returns." Instead Halle Berry plays Patience Phillips, a shy artist working at a cosmetics company. Yes, she's always kind to cats, and when she drowns, an Egyptian cat breathes a mystical feline lifeforce into her. In one unusually weird scene, it's shown that Patience now has a craving for catnip.

It's fun watching the new cat-enhanced character scampering over the tops of buildings, enjoying her quick reflexes and heightened awareness. Interrupting a jewel robbery, she shows her new acrobatic powers by ducking bullets, climbing walls, performing powerful leaps and karate kicks...all with her new cat personality. Before finishing off the last thief, she taunts him by coyly saying... "Meow."

The script makes clear that even in her life as Patience, she's feeling cat-like boldness and sometimes flashes of predatory behavior. ("The day I died was the day I also started to live," Patience says.) A kindly cop takes an interest in Patience, but the audience knows her wild side will keep them from uniting. "To live a life untamed and unafraid is the gift that I've been given," Patience says in the film's final voiceover. "And so my journey begins."

Sharon Stone - also an Oscar-nominated actress - is over-qualified for her role as the villainous executive at a cosmetics company. Her character is about to release a skin-damaging makeup, and Stone struggles to bring herself down to the campy level of the film's dialogue. ("I'm a woman," she says at one point. "I'm used to doing all kinds of things that I don't want to do...") The movie labors to create excitement with slick lighting and hip music.

But it's sabotaged by a script which is just too weird to work.

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