TNBA reviews: Cult of the Cat

Catwoman’s transformation from morally troubled kleptomaniac with a wildlife activist slant to a full-fledged femme fatale with nary a moral concern is both beneficial and problematic in varying respects. Beneficial because it delivers her from the preachy tepidity of animal rights crusades; problematic because it hollows out her character into something unbendingly amoral, an almost ghoulish abstraction who never fails to get her way, even when cornered by multiple opponents. The love affair between Batman and Catwoman that seemed plausible but unlikely is now jettisoned as a ludicrous impossibility.

Cult of the Cat places this new hedonistic, thrill-seeking and self-serving Catwoman front and center in a superfluous thriller involving a cult of cat-worshipping, blood-lusting zealots out to get her, either for the purpose of her bodily sacrifice or her conversion. Naturally Batman gets caught up in the chase, trading didactic aphorisms in between punches as he attempts to help Catwoman worm her way out of her mess. For the most part, the first two acts are breezy action fluff, the cult barreling onward like minions in a brainless action flick and every supposed pause a setup for a more explosive surprise. The incipiently irksome animation recedes in the wake of non-stop bravura storyboarding, so that one’s sense of animation quality is gradually displaced by a passive enjoyment of ceaseless movement, fluid or not.

Unfortunately this all comes screeching to a halt when Catwoman is captured by the cult and confronted by its leader, Thomas Blake. The story, and the devious allegiances and flagrant lies on which it rests, is ultimately boring and transparent. When Batman and Catwoman do an iteration of the same morality play they have been doing since The Cat and the Claw, the only apparent rearranging of their dynamic comes with Catwoman’s dispositional change from morally conflicted to morally indifferent. Batman, apparently unable to keep from investing his hope and trust in someone so perpetually dishonest, becomes the unlikely victim of a not-by-any-means unforeseeable double cross.

A third act gladiatorial fight with a giant, mutated cat monster doubles back to the brainless action fun of the first act, but it trades in fast-paced kinetics for subdued spatial confinement. If the prospect of a concentrated fight in an underground arena seems promising, that is only because fixed locations are usually accompanied by worthwhile visual décor. Without anything particularly grabbing to justify such an extended sequence—the surplus of analytical editing growing particularly tiresome—the fight reads more as a videogame boss battle than a high-stakes act-closer. The only integral information nested within is Catwoman’s obligatory betrayal of the cult to come to Batman’s aid.

By the time she commits a third backstabbing reversal of allegiance, escaping to Paris with a vast sum of jewels stolen from her former captors, it becomes apparent that her playful sociopathy is here to stay, if of course we didn’t reach that conclusion in the episode’s first few minutes.