Cast: James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba

Director: Tom Hooper

Review:

I’ll admit, I haven’t lived a perfect life.  I’ve tried my best, ultimately I’ve done some people wrong during my time alive.  I can’t go back and change time, but I have to think that watching all 110 minutes of Cats is enough karma for me to wipe the slate clean.  I’m in absolute shock that not only did this movie get made, but that it’s based off a widely-revered Broadway play.  An unorganized, disturbing mess of a movie, Cats is a very legitimate contender to be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Gotti.

At this point in the review, I’d usually start off with a brief synopsis of the plot and an introduction to some of the crucial characters of the movie.  Unfortunately I can’t do that for Cats because this movie has no plot.  It’s just a series of misadventures and meeting new cats for the entirety of the movie.  There’s no explanation of why the villains hate this society or the reason why the society exists in the first place and I can’t see how anyone can defend that.  By the end of this movie, I still had no idea what a Jellicle cat was and had to look it up on my own to realize that’s the name of their group.  This is never properly explained, they just say it repeatedly out of nowhere and expect us to understand.  There’s also something about a singing competition that allows these cats to have the chance to compete for a new life, but we have no idea why their current lives are bad as well as what they’d be heading off towards.  I’m fine with a movie thinking outside the box or being unique for the sake of artistic creativity, but there has to be a purpose for these decisions to happen.  The sad part is this may not be the worst part of the movie.  The worst part is the hypersexualization of the cats for the sake of seeming sleek and stylish.  I’m fairly certain at one point we see Idris Elba’s penis, and when he’s CGI’d to be a cat, it makes it very awkward and uncomfortable to watch.  Seeing all of these actors rub up and act like animals with each other with the context of making cats seem sexy is just jarring and makes me question my humanity.  Not only that, but since the CGI on these actors is appalling, it looks mostly like actors in skin-tight suits running around on all fours and licking themselves, which is obviously what people want to see. If I was doing a review with spoilers in it, I could really go into detail about why this movie is so bad, but it’s really centered around a plot that is completely meaningless and has no bearing on the outcome of the movie.  This movie is so bad I want to find a way to punish Andrew Lloyd Webber for ever writing the play in the first place, but since that’s not possible we can take it out on the cast of Cats.

Overall, I’ve seen miscarriages that look prettier than Cats and that experience is probably a better story than anything we got here.  I can’t tell if this movie is just a giant metaphor for something I just can’t wrap my head around or if it really is the nonsense I’ve made it out to be.  If you have to ask, then you probably already know the answer and recognize that everything about Cats is a broken, messy, diarrhetic joke that will end up in the movie version of the litter box.

Overall Score: 1/10