Cats review

CATS:

TOM HOOPER’S LATEST MUSICAL ADAPTATION IS A VERY, VERY BAD KITTY THAT MUST BE SEEN TO BE BELIEVED!

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: ½ out of 4

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

The Broadway musical comes to the screen in Cats

            Once in a blue moon, a film comes along that is so bad you cannot believe what you are watching and end up enjoying it because of how uniquely terrible it is. Cats is one of those movies, directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, Les Miserables (2012), The Danish Girl) and based on the hit Broadway stage musical of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Webber. 

            My expectations were set extremely low the moment I first saw the trailer, no kind way to put this but it looked downright atrocious with its ugly production design, CG effects and animation on par with a Robert Zemeckis motion-capture film, and absolutely horrific anthropomorphic cats with human faces, didn’t Universal learn their lesson from their film adaptation of The Cat in the Hat?

            However, I tried to be optimistic because for the most part I’ve liked Hooper’s work in the past, I think The King’s Speech is an absolutely phenomenal movie and while I wasn’t the biggest fan of his version of Les Miserables there were things about it I admired, and The Danish Girl while flawed had some unbelievable performances by Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander that made up for its historical inaccuracies. Maybe he could turn something as bizarre and odd as Cats into a musical spectacle just in time for the holidays NO!

            Cats is the textbook example of how not to adapt a musical to the screen and finds Tom Hooper making every wrong decision and the result is so disastrous that it’s practically fascinating. When you see Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Rebel Wilson, and Idris Elba wearing nightmare-fueled cat makeup and cheap-looking costumes do you want to stand up, applaud, and scream “Oscar!” or would you rather shrug, think “What the F#%& am I watching?”, and just laugh it all off? I guarantee the latter option is a lot more entertaining than trying to take this movie seriously. 

            Plot? What plot? It’s literally nothing more than watching a bunch of hideous humanoid cat demons doing cat things except as big musical numbers. Including but not limited to drinking milk, hissing, getting high on catnip, and interacting with equally terrifying looking mice, I’m not kidding if you thought the cats looked bad wait until you see these monstrosities.

            I’ve never seen the Cats musical before and even after seeing the movie I feel like I know even less about the source material than I did coming in if that even makes sense. But I’ll try my best to describe the plot of the movie. 

            In the streets of London, a kitten named Victoria (Francesca Hayward) is abandoned by her owner and the alley cats witnessing it bring her into the world of the Jellicle tribe. Victoria learns about an annual ceremony known as the Jellicle Ball where many cats compete for a chance to go to the Heaviside Layer and be granted a new life and sees an opportunity to find her purpose. 

            While preparing for the Jellicle Ball, Victoria encounters all sorts of colorful characters such as a mysterious magician known as Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson-Will, Diana and I, The Good Liar), a fat tabby named Fat Amy I mean, Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson-Pitch Perfect trilogy, Isn’t It Romantic?, Jojo Rabbit), a capricious tomcat known as Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo-Spinning Gold), a pudgy bourgeois cat named Bustopher Jones (James Corden-The Late Show with James Corden, Trolls 1 and 2, Peter Rabbit 1 and 2), a tap dancing ginger cat known as Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae), a villainous stray who plans to capture the other contestants and reach the Heaviside Layer as a birthright named Macavity (Idris Elba-Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Jungle Book (2016), Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), an aged glamour cat named Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson-Dreamgirls, The Secret Life of Bees, The Voice), a feline femme fatale known as Bombalurina (Taylor Swift-The Lorax, Taylor Swift: Miss Americana), the ancient theater cat simply named Gus (Ian McKellen-X-Men franchise, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Mr. Holmes), a snooty queen cat named Cassandra (Mette Towley-Hustlers), and the tribe’s wise matriarch Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench-Shakespeare in Love, James Bond franchise, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel 1 and 2) to name a few. 

            The film also stars Ray Winstone (Cold Mountain, The Departed, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) as Captain Growltiger.

            Overall, Cats is a truly unique failure and one that shouldn’t be avoided, for me this is the musical equivalent of The Room, The Neverending Story III, and Troll 2. It’s the kind of movie where you have your friends over, smoke some pot, have a few drinks, and get lost in this chaotic, bizarre world that is completely bonkers and will make you laugh unintentionally at the choices made in both the story and behind the scenes. 

            Here’s a fun drinking game, take a shot every time a character in this movie speaks normally in contrast to how many times they sing. Literally, most of the film’s dialogue consists of singing and musical numbers with barely any time to breathe in between numbers, it’s like one song followed by 5 seconds of silence and/or normal speaking, and then the next song starts, that is beyond desperate, even The Greatest Showman had better pacing than this, at least the songs sound decent. 

            Besides the hilariously bad pacing and bad production and costume design, the film has several weird moments like the horrific mice as previously discussed and a sequence in which Rebel Wilson cat has a musical number with dancing anthropomorphic cockroaches with human faces around her and for no reason she picks one up and eats it. At that point I started questioning whether I was watching a movie or if I just took a whole bunch of drugs and completely forgot what I took and when I took them. 

            This is also one of the ugliest movies I’ve ever had to sit through and I’m not just talking about the cats, the production design is so unpleasant to look at that it makes The Grinch’s Whoville look like The Wizard of Oz (I’m talking about the 2000 live-action Grinch with Jim Carrey just to make it clear). Nothing looks lively or magical, it feels more like you’re trapped watching a weird fever dream by the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland depicted by the people who made Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas.

            If you’re looking for a completely bonkers and totally insane movie to watch this holiday season and enjoy in an ironic way, then Cats will bring you so much joy. It is a marvel of a failure and my review cannot do it justice, get yourself a ticket and witness this heinous flick. 

Oh, before I forget: 

Clip from The Critic (c) Sony Pictures Television