Bad movies for me are usually total surprises. Rarely during a trailer will I be convinced a movie is going to be a disaster. So congratulations Cats! At no point during your advertising campaign did you once convince me your movie was going to be good, and you delivered exactly what you promised: pure, boring fetish material.
Cats is I guess about ascending to Cat Heaven through a show tha should be called “Jellicle’s Got Talent?” Old Deutoronomy (Judi Dench) the Jellicle cat matriarch, gets to choose the singing cat worthiest to be sent to the Heaviside Layer and be reincarnated. Sure. Our entry into the Jellicle world is the recently oprhaned Victoria (Francesca Hayward). Victoria meets all the Jellicle Ball contestants, including Bustopher Jones (James Corden), Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) and Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson). However, the devious Macavity (Idris Elba), who wrecked the life of previous star Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), has his sights set on the Heaviside Layer, and starts sabotaging other contestants to eliminate his competition. Taylor Swift is in here too, for some reason.
I’m pretty sure Cat’s trailer (below) was one of the most mocked videos on the internet of all time, taking what should be CGI cats and turning them into a furry fetish dream. But when you’re Tom Hooper, Oscar Winner and musical extraordinaire, no one tells you what to do! Here’s my impression of what Tom Hooper’s mind was doing putting Cats together. The 4th wall breaking the musical does? Let’s ignore that, but show no humans so everyone’s confused why the sets are built at human level but only populated by cats? Oh, and lets confuse them further by having all the businesses cater to the tiny cats while everything in the business is human sized? As for the songs, let’s be silly like the play and make everything humans in animal outfits, so when Rebel Wilson eats a human in a cockroach outfit, it’s funny because it’s cannibalism right? What’s that? Plot, you say? Well, how bout just being a singing competition, introducing a new cat for 3 minutes, forgetting they exist, and then introducing another new cat, with ballet interludes inbetween? Purrfect! And let’s not tell them what the tone of the movie is, so they can make it up as they go along. And every scene should be exactly the same so we can put the audience to sleep like a glass of warm milk. Should we save Macavity’s presence until the end of the movie like the Shark in Jaws? No! Let’s show him early and often, so no one’s scared of him really, and have all his power undercut by the fact that he needs Old Deuteronomy’s approval despite being an asshole to her the entire time. Excellent! So stupid it’s brilliant (it’s not)! BUT….we should save Taylor Swift for a pointless cameo in the middle of the movie and feature her heavily in the trailer, duping everyone! What award show am I going for with Cats? Why, the Razzies of course!
Cats sucks. It sucks so bad and so hard that I not only have no desire to see the long running musical, I don’t want to see or hear a cat for the forseeable future. I was bored by the 30 minute mark that I had written my review in the theatre within the hour…and had to sit through another 20 minutes of furry garbage after that that my yawns in those 20 minutes (5) exceeded the chuckles I had watching Cats (2, thanks Ian McKellen). And another thing: screw you Academy Awards, Cats is what you get for rewarding The King’s Speech best picture over The Social Network.