Cats (2019)

“Cats.” That single word summons more paralysing terror in those who watched this film than any horror movie released in the last 10 years. The initial trailer caused mass hysteria across the internet when it was unleased upon the world in 2019. Like the opening of Pandora’s Box, once the images of those obscene CGI cat-human hybrids had escaped into the world, they could not be put back into the darkness from which they came. Despite the memes and jeers pouring in from every direction, some people were optimistic, believing that this movie could be good… it wasn’t.

“Cats” is nothing more or less than the spawn of Satan himself. In fact, that’s a little bit cruel, if Satan had spawned this monstrosity, he would have disowned it and sent it packing immediately. Never have I witnessed a movie this expensive, with this calibre of on-screen talent at its disposal, failing on so many conceivable levels. The songs range from average to agonising, the cast are either miscast or have their dignity stripped away from them (or both) and the visuals are the stuff of the most fevered of night terrors. However, I loved watching it!

Yes it’s an appalling travesty, yes it makes no sense, but I’m so happy that “Cats” exists. From the ludicrous opening scene to the final musical number, in which DAME Judi Dench addresses the audience directly to remind us that “a cat is NOT a dog”, I was rolling on the floor, howling with laughter. It’s surreal to see a 95 million dollar film take this much of a swing and miss so spectacularly, but I had a blast watching this movie fall flat on its horrifying face. So although it’s undoubtedly one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, I enjoyed “Cats” immensely, but for all the wrong reasons.

So let’s go to the Jellicle ball and try to make sense of the disaster-piece that is Tom Hooper’s “Cats.”

As I mentioned previously, the cast in this nightmare are generally talented, but all of them are dreadful here. It’s definitely not the actors fault, as even Arnold Schwarzenegger, the God of one-liners, couldn’t have made putrid dialogue like “I believe you truly are a Jellicle cat, a dellicle cat” sound good. Whilst all of the performances are terrible, they’re all awful for different reasons.

James Cordon and Rebel Wilson feel severely out-of-place as the, er, comic relief? I’m aware that a great many people find these two actors irritating (Cordon in particular), but I personally don’t have anything against them. However, they are incredibly annoying here, they feel like they’re in a completely different movie to everyone else, performing their usual shticks of making fat jokes and falling over.

This is probably as good a point as any to mention how appalling the comedy in “Cats” is (the script is littered with atrocious cat puns that make Halle Berry’s “Catwoman” look like a Christopher Nolan movie.) That isn’t to say that “Cats” is devoid of comedic value, as listening to Ray Winstone singing or watching SIR Ian McKellen lick milk out of a bowl made me laugh more than most modern comedies do, but I think it’s fair to say that these moments weren’t supposed to make us snigger.

I feel really sorry for Francesca Hayward, Naoimh Morgan and the other young actors who have never been in a movie before and presumably thought that “Cats” was going to be their ticket to stardom. I sincerely hope that they’ll get another chance to prove themselves as actors, and that the rest of their careers won’t be ruined because of this mess.

I’ll admit, Idris Elba and Jennifer Hudson were almost good in “Cats”, Elba is clearly relishing the opportunity to chew up the scenery and Hudson attempts to give an emotionally rich performance. Sadly, both actors are undercut by the woeful CGI that the entire film is caked in, which creates many deeply disturbing moments throughout the run time.

Elba’s character removes his fur coat about two-thirds into the movie, revealing his dark brown fur underneath. What makes this so unsettling is that A. his fur coat looks like it’s been made from the pelts of skinned cat corpses and B. he looks stark raving naked as he prances around and flirts with Taylor Swift (whose barely in the film.) Do I need to explain why a nude-looking mutant Idris Elba feline fiend is distressing to watch?

Jennifer Hudson also sports a fur coat (I have so many questions) but thankfully she never takes it off. The problem with her character is that throughout the entirety of “Cats”, a tendril of snot is careening down her character’s face. I understand that this is supposed to signify how sickly and depressed she is, but for crying out loud, I couldn’t take my eyes of that train of ooze whenever Hudson was on screen. It was really distracting!

Imagine being the CG artist who crafted that strand of mucus, you work long hours, miss your kid’s karate ceremonies and become increasingly distant with your spouse. But it’s all worth it, because you constructed a photorealistic trail of snot for the 2019 film “Cats”…

Before I move onto the other elements of “Cats” that make it an atrocity against all of humanity, I’d like to voice my anger that Tom Hooper took SIR Ian McKellen and DAME Judi Dench, two of the greatest actors of their generation and absolute national treasures, and destroyed every ounce of nobility they possessed. These are two actors that are respected across the globe, they’ve starred in some of my all-time favourite movies and have both been nominated for Academy Awards (with Dench winning for “Shakespeare in Love.” She should have won again for “Skyfall.”) Yet in “Cats”, they are transformed into computer generated monstrosity’s that will haunt my dreams until the day I die, spouting horrifically bad dialogue and doing things we never wanted to see these legendary thespians doing. I laughed, but inside, I was crying!

Even though the characters have the charisma of a pile of polystyrene ducks and the visuals should be number one on the Schmidt pain index, if the narrative in “Cats” was compelling, the film might have been saved. Sadly, there is no plot in “Cats”, I still don’t understand what a Jellicle is, the main goal of every character is to DIE and the pacing is about as fast as a mouse on its way to a cat convention. The story unfolds like this: a cat appears to sing their own praises, then another cat appears and does the exact same thing. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat!

“Cats” is based on a supposedly popular musical, so at the very least, the music in the film should be good right? WRONG! The songs are aggravatingly overlong rambles that fail to make us care about anything that’s happening in the film, they don’t have any logic behind them and they aren’t engaging to listen to. I will admit, I tapped my feet twice whilst watching “Cats”, but that may have been because I was being sucked into a maelstrom of madness and mania, rather than because I actually liked the songs.

But without a doubt, the biggest flaw of this hate crime of a film is the visual design. “Cats” is a truly petrifying watch, the CG cats that scuttled out of the darkest pits of hell are some of the most blood-curdling beasts I’ve ever witnessed! The cats with human faces, feet and hands (plus a wedding ring in Judi Dench’s case) shatter the Uncanny Valley into pieces. Our brains cannot comprehend what we’re seeing, we know that the characters aren’t human, but we can still distinguish their human features, causing our minds to go completely haywire. This isn’t helped by the fact that the scale of the characters is constantly shifting from scene to scene, which adds to the hallucinatory atmosphere. This hair-raising horror is at its most unnerving when Rebel Wilson’s cat unzips her own fur to reveal a dress and more fur underneath, eats a cockroach plastered with a person’s face upon it and terrorises a group of mice with children’s faces… WHAT?! WHY?! HOW?!

I feel bad for any young children whose first trip to the cinema was to see “Cats.” If I’d seen this movie as a kid, it would have scarred me for the rest of my life and made me never want to see a film ever again!

In conclusion, “Cats” is as traumatic, baffling and disgraceful as everyone says it is. It’s possible that this will go the way of “Plan 9 from Outer Space” or “The Room” and become a cult classic, but as of now, “Cats” deserves all the criticism it receives. It’s a complete CATastrophe.

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.