Dec 19, 2019 7:00 AM

Cats Is as Terrible as the Internet Guessed It Might Be

The movie adaptation of the beloved musical is a disaster from start to finish.

Cats, depending on who you ask, is either a beloved musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber or a reviled musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Originally staged on the West End in London in 1981—and later on Broadway in 1982, where it ran for a record-breaking 18 years—the premise is quite simple: It’s about cats. Cats played by humans, specifically, in skin-tight costumes covered in feline markings, their faces painted like children at a small-town festival. They sing and dance, quite a bit, about cat stuff.

The show, as you know by now, was a hit, winning the Tony for Best Musical and earning poet T.S. Eliot a posthumous Tony nomination. (The musical, sung through without dialog, relies on Eliot’s collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats not just as its source material, but also for its songs' lyrics.) Reviewing the show for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote: “[I]t's a musical that transports the audience into a complete fantasy world that could only exist in the theater and yet, these days, only rarely does. Whatever the other failings and excesses, even banalities, of Cats, it believes in purely theatrical magic, and on that faith it unquestionably delivers.”

Nearly four decades later, Oscar winner Tom Hooper has helmed a long-awaited—and star-studded—film adaptation. As he did with 2012’s Les Misérables, Hooper has brought this international musical behemoth to the big screen, with the help of celebrated actors Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, and Idris Elba, plus pop stars like Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo. (I suppose Jennifer Hudson, who didn’t win American Idol but did nab an Oscar for Dreamgirls, falls into both categories.) So how does this movie musical compare with the stage version? Does it transport the audience to a fantasy world that could only exist in the medium of film? Does it deliver on the promise of movie magic, in particular the “digital fur technology” its creatives have boasted so much about in publicity before the release? If you were a part of the collective internet freakout when the first trailer for the movie dropped in July, expressing what could only be described as international confusion and repulsion, you may not be surprised by what I’m about to tell you: Cats is awful.

It has been a while since a big-budget, star-packed studio film has felt like such a disaster from start to finish. Befuddling, confusing, deeply ugly, and incredibly un-fun, I surely won’t be the only critic to recommend Cats be put down immediately. What has for decades been something of a pop culture joke is now an even more wackadoo entertainment event. It’s almost as if Hooper and company were tasked with making the worst movie they could conceive of, that it was one epic troll—that could be the nicest thing I could say about it, that they have achieved something.

It’s not like the source material isn’t already bananas. Imagine: Grown-ass adults, coming together to make a stage musical about cats starring humans, scurrying and prancing across the stage for two and a half hours and singing wacky songs as part of a revue that culminates in the one ballad that everyone (even those who haven’t seen the show) actually knows. “Memory” has inarguably had a larger life than the show itself as a contemporary torch-song standard. (Barbra Streisand has recorded her own version, as has former Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, who also sang the song on the West End when she played the role of Grizabella in a revival of the show.) For most people, the wait for that recognizable song is a long one; for anyone sitting down in a movie theater, the wait is slightly less long—the film runs two hours—but no less arduous. On the way to the finale, Cats requires audiences to sit through slapstick numbers by Rebel Wilson and James Cordon (both playing cats whose main traits are their weight and laziness) and deeply serious dirge-like songs sung by Dench and McKellen. There’s also a ham-fisted plot in which Idris Elba’s Macavity—a supervillain cat modeled on Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Moriarty—kidnaps the featured cats one by one in his own attempt to earn reincarnation.

About that plot. Cats the show is generally plotless, a musical revue that features these idiosyncratic cats performing songs that show off their individual habits and talents. Some might say that the show suffers for its lack of a story; others—me!—might say the plot is very simple: Once a year, the cats of London join together to celebrate the Jellicle Ball, an event at which one cat (chosen by the wise elder Old Deutoronomy, played here by Dench in a gender-flipped casting) will be reborn to start a new life. (“It’s just A Chorus Line, but with cats,” I’ve drunkenly said at parties more times than I can count.) The film takes great pains to make this even more clear, and it’s all seen through the eyes of the young Victoria, a beautiful white cat (played by ballerina Francesca Hayward) who is dumped on a London dock by her owner, and taken in by this feline tribe and ushered into the larger cat community. In the movie version of Cats the Jellicle Ball feels more like a reality TV competition, with each cat singin’ and dancin’ not just for the entertainment of their peers but for a trip to the Heavyside Layer. (Cat Heaven?) The evil Macavity, always slinking around in a fur coat and giant hat, tries to lure Victoria in under his wing, meanwhile kidnapping the other singing cats one by one to ensure he’s the only candidate left standing.

It’s the kind of competition where everyone should be voted off the scratching post. No one really comes out of Cats looking great. The audience at the screening I saw cackled almost every time Dench appeared on screen; Wilson and Cordon do their usual schtick; Elba and Derulo are notably not sexy. Hudson seems incredibly bored. Most of the female performers’ faces look too big for their heads, and you half expect those faces to slide right off like in a David Lynch movie. (They also have humanesque breasts, which as many online commentators have noted, is just weird.) Then there’s “Beautiful Ghosts,” the song Swift wrote with Lloyd Webber for the Victoria character, which … well, I’m terrified of Taylor Swift fans, so let me just say: Great ghosts, beautiful ghosts. Nobody sounds particularly great, and my suspicion is that Hooper had his cast sing live as he did, infamously, with Les Misérables—a real commitment to authenticity for a movie about cats with human faces, hands, and feet.

Ultimately, the appeal of Cats is entirely based on the humans who are in it. The show is all spectacle and absolutely ridiculous. But it’s a spectacle precisely because of the effort the performers put into it—as well as the creative endeavors of the costumers, the makeup artists, the choreographers. All of that is present, in theory, in the film; the large-scale sets are ambitious, the dancing is impressive. But it’s also all weighed down by the special effects, which makes the redeemable pieces pale against the messiness of the technology employed to make the human cast look more like cats. The result is something that looks very fake and extremely distracting, with no sense of proportion. (How big is a cat supposed to be? I’m not certain anyone involved in this did the math.) That Hooper admitted he was down to the wire, finishing the film mere hours before the movie’s New York premiere Monday night, makes it all feel like a group project spawned from the stoner minds of college freshmen, turned in just before the final deadline.

Surely I’m being too harsh. Perhaps this movie just wasn’t made for me. I mean, I do love Cats—I’ve seen the show four times, three times as an adult, not out of irony but out of genuine affection. But this movie did not bring that same level of joy, and it’s not even one I would recommend for an ironic viewing. Perhaps, then, this is a movie for a new generation of kids who will fall in love with the musical just as I did. As I watched Cats the other night, that was the idea I settled on. Then a young boy sitting two seats over from me sat straight up, turned to his mother, and said “I hate this!” So maybe not.