SINCE September 11, anthrax, and the war on terror, Hollywood has swapped its super- heroes for superpeople — yes, people — to distract the population from realising that almost everything is a lot worse than it used to be. Enter Catwoman and The Bourne Supremacy, which leapt into North American cinemas this week offering very different versions of heroic fantasy.

For Catwoman, the film-makers clearly thought that Halle Berry’s leather-clad “booty” would be enough to keep audiences interested, but the truth is that the Oscar-winning actress is hopelessly miscast. Warner Bros should have been brave enough to cast someone much younger, quirkier and less well known, as Sony did so spectacularly with the nerdish Tobey Maguire as Spiderman.

Berry plays Patience Phillips, a hippyish commercial artist at a beauty products company who accidentally hears a dirty corporate secret, is murdered and is then reborn with magical cat powers. As the synopsis suggests, Catwoman’s problems go several fathoms deeper than casting.

Unlike other recent comic book-inspired films (X-Men, Spider-Man), the movie fails to establish a consistent tone, more essential for its genre than for perhaps any other. One minute we’re in a lame Sandra Bullock comedy, the next a Black Eyed Peas music video. It all starts to look like exactly what it is: a load of old codswallop.

Berry’s Catwoman doesn’t even seem to use her powers properly, spending most of her time wiggling her backside and cracking a black whip. And if she continues to order White Russians with no vodka and extra cream, that shapely bottom is not going to be shapely for much longer.

As for the villains, they are too cartoonish to be frightening. They are played by Lambert Wilson (with one of those stuck-up-Brit accents that make Americans whimper, even though he’s French) and a redoubtable, spiky-haired Sharon Stone.

Catwoman’s biggest problem, however, is that unlike Bourne, or even Spiderman, the burden of her superpowers never seems to dawn on her, making her seem rather shallow and self-absorbed. And what kind of hero, or heroine, is that? It’s so last decade.

There was a Cold War echo to the first Jason Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity, based Robert Ludlum’s novel, in which our amnesiac hero (Matt Damon) tried to piece together his former existence as a semi-lobotomised lethal weapon and outsmart his former employers, the CIA.

Bourne almost seemed like a metaphor for the generation of American cinemagoers who watched him: on September 11, 2001, they woke up largely ignorant of the history that created Osama bin Laden and his murderous henchmen. Like Bourne, they have since been trying desperately to understand how their former selves (ie, their parents) landed them in such a mess.

Bourne also offered cinemagoers a hero so utterly dependable in his weaponlike smartness and hitman know-how that the pleasure of watching him was more about finding out how he would overcome the obstacles, rather than worrying about whether he would emerge unscathed. He was perfect for the fragile post-9/11 era.

The Bourne Supremacy now allows audiences to enjoy the outsmarting again, this time with equally exotic European locations, a faster car chase, racier soundtrack, and arguably a more challenging script. The one downside is that the British director, Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, Omagh), plays with his handheld camera and focus control once too often, an irritating tic for scenes that don’t need it.

In some ways, Bourne’s loneliness and self-loathing seem truer to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s James Bond than the blowdried smarm of Pierce Brosnan. And seeing that an action-based character can convey such depth, in spite of being on the move for the entire film, is down to Matt Damon’s masterful performance.

The American critics bickered over whether The Bourne Supremacy was better than the first one, but most agreed that it was an outstanding summer flick with some of the best chase sequences in recent memory. “A close to perfect example of an expertly designed and executed thriller,” con-cluded the Chicago Tribune.

At the box office, the film took a solid $53.5 million over the weekend, beating the debut of its predecessor and knocking I, Robot into second place with $21.1 million.

Catwoman came in third with a disappointing $17.2 million, hardly surprising given the mostly negative reviews. The Chicago Sun-Times advised the film’s director, the enigmatically named Pitof, to use another name on his next project. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sneered that it “may not be the worst movie of the summer, but it certainly is begging to be drop-kicked to the curb”.

Sean Macaulay is away