The appeal of Halle Berry trussed up like a skinny S&M kitten in black leather and brandishing a whip shouldn't be underestimated. Finding Catwoman -- an airbrushed serving of meow mix -- exciting overall is another matter, especially if you've seen this summer's estimable comic book flick Spider-Man 2.  Nothing save Berry, and then only for a few all-too-fleeting moments, looks half as good.

Feline grace is one of many missing ingredients, and everything on screen has a suspicious fluorescent glow. The story hangs precariously on references to temple cats from ancient Egypt and a beauty cream that turns women's skin into marble. Catwoman has a hardening affect on viewers, no matter how fancy the computer effects or how high they crank up the soundtrack. Scratch that. The movie is deadening because it's visually and aurally overdone in a lazy, scattershot manner that can't cover up the normal lack of substance in summer entertainment.

Heroine Patience Philips (Berry) works as a graphic designer for a cosmetics company run by a carping married couple, a philandering chief executive (Lambert Wilson) and an aging model (Sharon Stone). The revolutionary facial treatment they're about to launch has dangerous side effects. Patience learns of them and is murdered in an implausible act of industrial homicide, only to be resurrected by a cat of a certain special breed.

It's crucial to the movie's success that Patience's  transformation into a cat person is spooky or at least magical. It's neither, and her catlike characteristics are inconsistently rendered throughout. Part of the blame lies with Berry; as lovely as she is, she doesn't move well.

Those old enough to remember Julie Newmar or Eartha Kitt teasing the Caped Crusader on the 1960's TV show won't be impressed by Berry trying to be naughtily come-hither. And compared to Michele Pfeiffer in Batman Returns, her purring and hissing are laughable. As her well-deserved Oscar for Monster's Ball testifies, Berry is best suited to the damsel in distress and less convincing as the ditzy wallflower or wild predator. She's like an old woman's dressed-for-sex housecat, out on a limb in need of rescue.

The computer-generated effects presided over by director Pitof aren't up to the job. They lack fluidity. Picking up on the cosmetics theme, the human faces look plastic. Benjamin Bratt, playing a studly detective who digs Patience (and is the only cop on duty in the unnamed metropolis) resembles a mannequin. The general absence of suppleness signifies a vacancy that goes more than skin deep. Art direction dominated by frosty blues, burnt reds, and carmel colors lends an attractive veneer but soon gets tiresome.

Instead of commenting on feminine duality, with Frances Conroy (from Six Feet Under) as a cat lady chanting nonsense about the heroine's shy and aggressive qualities, they should have gone for total camp. Catwoman teeters on that sensibility yet isn't organized enough to fully embrace it. (More Stone and Wilson would have helped.) There's only room for one conflicted superhero this summer, and, Catwoman, you're no Spidey.

(Released by Warner Bros. and rated "R" for action violence and some sensuality.)