Cats (2019); Whatever You Do, Don’t Pay to See It

Cats has proven to be a failure and its mostly due to its own hubris. It’s a bloated catastrophe that rested on the laurels of a legacy brand’s built-in fan base, thinking said fan base, and other casual theater goers, would be enough to blow smoke up the film adaptation’s ass long enough to balloon it into a profit. Yet the bigwigs behind Cats didn’t seem to take into account that its golden calf of a property hasn’t held weight in popular culture since being the butt of jokes in the 1990’s. Nevertheless, the careless way this movie was slapped together is the reason I’m smiling ear to ear after learning this $100+ million dollar picture only made $6.5 million it’s first week.

Cats shows that Tom Hooper’s prowess is not directing musicals (and yes, I thought Les Misérables was trash). He sort of can’t really direct actors either. There are some strong and tender performances in Cats that should be noted, albeit the really wild, uncomfortable ones stand out the most (Sir Ian McKellen and that damn water bowl). But Hooper misfires constantly with Cats by refusing to let moments crescendo into a emotional bang. Right out the gate, everyone on screen is at a 10, and they just keep going up. I would say that Jennifer Hudson gives an astounding performance, if she had performed only one “showstopping” number where she cries streams of saline from eyes and even nostrils, but she does it not twice but thrice! Hudson’s intense emotional number is outdone by herself doing it again two more times with all the trimmings — nostril snot and all — making it tedious and eye-rolling to watch. And in typical Hooper fashion, the performance is captured through tight close-ups, you know so you can really FEEL the emotions.

If only that same intention of realness was brought to the insanely bad visual effects, which makes the entire film embarrassingly goofy in the worst ways. The use of motion-capture on the actors ruins any chance of witnessing the impressive flexibility of the feline or even the human body, as the VFX can’t capture minute, subtle details. Instead, it makes the dancer’s movements appear boxy and stiff while making all the cats look creepy in the most uncanny way possible. Perhaps this all could have worked if the characters of Cats had all been long-haired cats, but alas most are short-haired leaving a constant reminder to audiences that the human body just doesn’t resemble a cat’s anatomy at all.

The plot isn’t as daffy as others have exaggerated. It’s simply about a stray cat who stumbles into a cult that annually selects a member to die. Of course, this is a prestigious honorable death, so all the old heads of the cult want some of that sweet death release. The stray meets most of the gang and learns about them through song and dance, then she selects one of them to die and becomes accepted by the cult. It’s basically Midsommar. Some of the music is actually fun and entertaining, but again this movie is just god-awful because it didn’t attempt to bring true artistic integrity from the beginning. The cats don’t move like cats because they’re not trained contortionists or dancers, most of them are just actors. So then why use such elaborate visual effects if their bodies really aren’t the focus here? It instead just leaves trails of matrix-like glitches over background actors faces and inconsistent feet and hands.

Sometimes Cats is funny on purpose, but most times it’s not. In fact, when it actually tries to be funny through James Corden or Rebel Wilson, it falls flat through fat jokes and Wilson’s annoying shtick of being aggressively raunchy. Cats is a stupid movie, plain and simple and the more I think about it, the more frustrated I get. Cats doesn’t care about you and you shouldn’t give that smug sonofbitch the sanctification of pretending it cares you. Skip this one. Knit a pair of booties or something instead.