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Cats (2019)
Absolutely nightmare, absolutely recommended
Everyone complains about their job, it's just what we do. No matter what you do for a living thank yourself that you don't have the job of writing the synopsis to go on the back of the Cats DVD case as it'd be a truly impossible, tortured job. The only comfort anyone involved in this feline fantasy chore of a 110 minutes is that they sure walked away with their share of the (even more insane) budget. Even Idris Elba, who managed to sell the PG13 version of Roland in the recent Dark Tower, struggles to hide the fact he evidently didn't want to have the job of the hat wearing villain in this musical monstrosity.
Cats opens up with a scene of a cat being dumped from a bag into the streets of London and soon met with a cavalry of crazy human shaped cats content on singing about everything and anything; many of the songs have little to no context such as an early song about how cats must have three names, a point that's soon dropped and never mentioned again. I've honestly never seen a film before where I've come away having no idea what it was actually about, move along Kubrick and 2001 Space Odyssey, the real question is what this is all about and why anyone would spend the $80 to $100 million making this nightmare. Is this how my grandmother felt watching The Matrix*?
Speaking of the budget, surely majority of the money was allocated on the PR machine as its evident that the film is unfinished; in Judi Dench's introduction she is wearing a gold ring with a green gem on her left hand (a cat in the background is also wearing a ring) later this disappears and is replaced with a smaller ring, rumoured to be her wedding ring, on her left hand. Sometimes the cats have furred hands, sometimes they don't bother animating that in. The whole film suffers floaty head syndrome, caused by issues when the animators can't or don't have time to track the skin onto the actors giving the whole film even more uneasy feel to the look and movement.
I suppose musicals don't have to adhere to the three act structure however this film doesn't seem to have any structure to it whatsoever and wraps up with a cat chosen by the Dench cat as the one who will ascend the skies in a magic hot air balloon, I couldn't explain that cat's background all I know is 1) she cries a lot when singing and 2) she seems to have some history with Elba cat who has magical powers; I shit you not, he's not even the only magical cat in this Lloyd Webber acid trip. Elba cat frequently turns up at the end of the musical numbers to magic a cat off to a barge on the river Thames that is ran by Ray Winstone cat (and yes, the former hardman has a number of his own, sans any auto tune) as apparently the cat who sings the best song shall be the one who rides the balloon? I've never seen the Broadway musical Cats before so I can't speak whether that follows any kind of internal logic to it however the "cats" here wear clothing, sometimes, (the number with a dozen cats tap dancing on a railway line has to be seen to believed) whilst the Ian McKellen cat wears gloves with the fingers cut off and a coat over an old cardigan yet drinks out of a bowl of water (whatever McKellen got paid, wasn't enough) and Rebel Wilson cat unzips her cat skin twice to reveal a dress on top of another cat skin (I am not making any of this up, honestly).
Though I am sure neither the half-dozen people that went missing from my screening or my son, who kept leaning over to inform me that he didn't understand "what is going on", will not agree with me I would 100% recommend that everyone puts this on their bucket list as proves that when Hollywood misses the mark it always best they do it in spectacular fashion. One thing for sure I will not have a tipple before bed tonight as I don't want to risk any of this thing haunting my dreams.
*somehow The Matrix with all its ground breaking SFX and set pieces cost $20 million less to make than Cats.