Cats review by Chris Bittle

Cats review by Chris Bittle

Even with big names James Corden, Rebel Wilson, Taylor Swift, and Jason Derulo on screen, I was the only one in the theater (with the exception of a few friends as a company). That should have been my first clue in deciding whether or not to see Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Cats” in theaters.

Despite the lack of fellow audience members, I was determined to see for myself what “Cats” was all about.

“Purr-haps,” I thought, “There is a paw-sibility that this movie will not be the a-paw-ling cat-astrophe that every review I’ve read leading up to it has made it out to be.”

Un-fur-tunately, such as only thought of mine.

Complete with tap dancing cockroaches and an easter egg reference to “Avengers: Infinity War”, “Cats” is what I would call a feline fever dream. I will never look at cats the same way again. Even the furries should have a problem with this.
Albeit, the vocals were lovely.

Unlike typical movie-musicals, none of the songs sounded obviously autotuned. Jason and T-Swift do not disappoint. Jason’s riffs in “The Rum Tum Tugger” were ‘purr-fect.’ I might say that his sporting of a fur coat added to the effect. I mean come on, a cat wearing a fur coat? That’s a comedy.

With regards to the rest of the costuming: only a select few characters were wearing shoes, whereas the rest of the tribe was barefoot. I was confused about the significance of their footwear. Do shoes denote some sort of hierarchy within the tribe? Or have some of the cats just gotten lucky and fished them out of the trash? Since there is no mention of rankings among the cats–with the exception of Old Deuteronomy being the leader–I have to assume the latter.

The CGI was uncomfortable.

I wasn’t sure if I was watching people or cats. With this in mind, I wish they would have gone all the way and fully animated the film the way Disney has been adapting the classics, such as The Lion King. The second alternative being: skip the animation altogether, and record the production live with actors in full costume, the way it was done for Les Miserables. Instead, the half-CGI half-actor amalgam was disfigured and unsettling.

In conjunction with their frightening demi-cat figure, each actor is cat-sized relative to the world they live in. Because of the scary CGI, it’s so hard to buy into the fact that they are even cats in the first place. So, instead, it just looked like a bunch of tiny, hairy people were running around.

Tom Hoopers “Cats” brought me back to the days of riding in the back of the car on road trips whining to my parents “Are we there yet?” where the implied destination is the end of the movie.