“Normally I don’t write plot summaries as reviews, but in the case of Cats, I think it’s fine because I’m going to get 10% of this right, tops, even though I’m trying my hardest.
A cat is abandoned on the streets and makes friends with other cats who say the word jellicle a lot. Which is confusing because they’re singing it and you can’t tel if it’s just some made up bullshit word, but it turns out it is. However, jellicle IS explained. The only problem is that it’s explained in the final line of the movie. So someone knew this needed an explanation and also kind of didn’t know?
We are introduced to a series of cats who, based on musical performance, are trying to be reincarnated. Possibly as more cats, possibly as other creatures, this isn’t clear. What’s important is that this is like American Idol except the stakes are determining what happens beyond the veil.
We meet Rebel Wilson cat who seems like she’s stripping off her skin until it’s revealed that under her skin she has a pink outfit with another skin beneath. Also many jokes that she’s clumsy, possibly also fat.
We have a cat who is a magician. Not like an escape artist, that would make sense for a cat, but a magician who does card tricks.
We have a James corden cat who is fat and gets hit in the nuts because the jokes were written by the same team as let’s say the guys who brought you Wild Hogs.
I don’t know if there’s any dialogue in this movie that isn’t sung, it’s all sung, sort of, even if it sounds like when I make up a song and it doesn’t have a consistent rhythm or specific notes or even rhyme or resemble a song other than I’m saying the words una singy way.
Jennifer Hudson is like a bag lady cat or something who everyone hates even though all cats are basically bag ladies if you think about it.
Idris Elba gets the bell from Mario 3D world that turns him into a cat, complete with him yelling Meow every time he does something. He’s the villain because he’s trying to be reincarnated, and Taylor Swift is his goon who is maybe Cosby-ing cats with catnip but maybe they like catnip? This part kind of tracks, I feel like cats have a weird relationship with catnip.
Then Judi dench, playing the cowardly lion, gets magic-Ed away to a boat, but fortunately, the cats sing a song to the magician cat about how he should magic her back, so he tries to do magic and then she walks in from offscreen, apparently now back in the room. You’d think there’d be some poof of smoke and a grand entrance, but she’s just sort of there. You might also think this would appear more magical because moments later the magic cat teleports himself across the room in a green smoke column or something, but you can’t green smoke column them all, I’ve always said that.
There’s a cat that works on a train and does a tap dance number, and this really highlights why this movie stinks: singing and dancing, the performance aspect, is impressive on the stage, but it’s not impressive in a movie. Because they can cut, paste, so multiple takes, edit the sound, and because everything I’m seeing is CG, dance moves and acrobatics are not impressive looking, even if they were done in real life. It just sort of seems like they used CG, but instead of doing things that’d be otherwise impossible, they just made things that people actually did look worse, weightless and lifeless.
The music sounds like shit. I don’t know if this is the original soundtrack, but there were some points that made me wonder if a very stoned John Carpenter took an afternoon off from playing basketball on PlayStation to turn in a couple riffs.
There’s a lot of focus on how bad the cats look, but the real criminals are the ones who got paid to do the backgrounds. I think they pulled up old files from Moulin Rouge and wetted them up a little with a plug-in and called it a day.
It’s got the Star Wars Episode One problem. In that movie, the pod racing actually looks great. The problem is when you have characters walking down a hallway that isn’t there, it looks like shit, and it’d be so easy to have a set they could walk in. I get it, you can’t actually have a pod race through the desert and endanger that child actor’s life. But you can definitely have Liam Neeson walk down a hallway.
You can’t have cats without some cg tails, but you could definitely have them in a giant set that looks like an alley, and it’d look so much better.
I think there are some folks trying to make this into a so bad it’s good thing, and you shouldn’t fall for that because it is really bad, but not in a fun way. It’s not something that is a totally unique vision that’s so misguided that it ends up being wonderful because that kind of thing doesn’t really work with big teams on movies like this, and there are too few What were they thinking moments? Other than Jennifer Hudson’s nose running into her mouth on multiple occasions, which is not a cat thing as far as I’ve experienced.
I would like to suggest some better musical numbers for a Cats reboot:
-cat sashaying along a mantle, pushing stuff off to punctuate the song
-cat who has already been fed trying to convince another human that it hasn’t been fed yet.
-cat singing a version of If you have ghosts, with emphasis on the line in the night / I am real.
-cat thinking that after its owner has been gone for 4 minutes they are probably never going to return.”