Review: Cats

Cats, directed by Tom Hooper, tells the TAIL of a group of cats known as the Jellicle Cats. Each year on one night, the Jellicle Cats hold a “Jellicle Ball”, where the Jellicle leader Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench), pick a cat to be the “Jellicle choice”, where that lucky cat can ascend the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. Which cat will be chosen?????????????????

Cats was quite the CAT-astrophe. That honestly shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. I don’t think anyone who has seen the infamous trailers thought this would be a good movie. Heck the Broadway show this film’s based on wasn’t very good either; it’s just a compilation of cats introducing themselves in song form for two hours. This film just goes to show that not everything can be translated into screen, no matter how many Grammy and Academy Award winners you can muster up.

Tom Hooper can be a generally good director, winning the Oscar for The King’s Speech back in 2011, and he’s dabbled with musicals before with 2012’s Les Misérables. So seeing him churn out this horrific looking film is a conundrum. Some of the shots are very well composed, but they’re ruined by these ugly looking characters filling up the screen.

The CGI was complete and utter garbage. Where do I even start with this? The uncanny human faces and hands copy-and-pasted on these cats, the un-rendered fur textures on certain characters making them look like disgusting blobs from a bad PS4 game, floating CGI props that the characters unrealistically grab, James Corden drinking a 2D GIF of champagne pouring out of a bottle, the list goes on. To top it all off, the version of the film I saw was apparently the PATCHED version that Universal hastily sent out to theaters to address the CGI problems. You know a film’s bad when the studio is STILL working on a movie even after it’s released.

The jokes were cringe-worthy coming out from characters like Rebel Wilson and James Corden, there was no story much like the Broadway play so it’s hard to stay invested in what’s going on, the characters all have no real arcs so it’s hard to give a crap about any of them, all the scenes felt disjointed and pointless, this whole film was a huge misfire in every way. The only things I did enjoy was the singing and some of the songs. Good on Hooper to actually cast singers for a movie this time around (unlike his last musical outing) as a good amount of the songs was very well sung and even CAT-chy at times. But outside from that and Idris Elba’s ridiculously hilarious performance as the EVIL Macavity, nothing else stood out for me.

Overall this was an unpleasant experience, but what else did you expect? This film was all kinds of wrong and is made for no one. The movie is tanking at the box office so I feel like I don’t need to tell you not to watch it. If you’re the kind of person that likes to get off on pain then I guess you can see this then, but even then there are better films to satisfy your need to torture yourself as this was not the worst movie of the year believe it or not. Regardless, just don’t watch this film, but you already know that.

Final Verdict: 2/10