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Cats review – will haunt viewers for generations

No amount of A-list stars can save Tom Hooper’s dire Lloyd Webber adaptation from being a career low for all involved

W hen asked at the world premiere of Cats on Monday if he was happy with how the film looked, director Tom Hooper replied wearily that he had finished it “at 8am the previous day”. Yet one wonders if more time spent perfecting the state-of-the-art digital fur technology in his baffling adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash-hit stage musical would have helped.

The original musical, based on TS Eliot’s 1939 poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats , is widely acknowledged as a plotless spectacle. That Hooper, who made 2012’s Oscar-winning Les Misérables , felt the story would lend itself to a feature film was optimistic at best. In a neon-lit junkyard somewhere in London’s West End, abandoned white kitten Victoria (the Royal Ballet’s Francesca Hayward) finds herself among a community of “jellicle cats” competing for the chance to ascend to the heaviside layer, aka cat heaven, where they will be reborn. Each cat must prove themselves by singing a song: one lucky winner is chosen by Judi Dench’s gender-flipped Old Deuteronomy (who has fur, but also, illogically, wears a fur coat). Much like season three of American Idol , there are tears, VIP guests and a thankless performance from the otherwise talented Jennifer Hudson.

With no narrative scaffolding in place, the film relies on Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn’s songs. Styled in a Prince-style purple coat, pop star Jason Derulo brings some sexual energy to Rum Tum Tugger (those familiar with Derulo’s signature song intro will be disappointed to discover that he does not begin by announcing his own name). Taylor Swift’s bratty, libidinous Bombalurina is better – stomping around in high heels, shimmying her furry breasts and purring “Macavity the mystery cat” with a faux-British accent. Swift is the only cast member who seems to be having fun, perhaps because she only appears in the film for approximately 10 minutes.

For most of the others involved, it’s a clear career low. Rebel Wilson’s number involves a conga line of dancing cockroaches, while James Corden’s overweight tabby, Bustopher Jones, rolls around in an actual pile of litter. One wonders if the actors are aware of what they’ve gotten themselves into. There’s something undignified about watching Ian McKellen (who plays Gus the Theatre Cat) meowing and lapping a bowl of milk in his bare feet; Jennifer Hudson’s Grizabella is ugly-crying in every one of her scenes; and when Rum Tum Tugger grimaces direct to camera, it feels like Derulo is breaking the fourth wall.

The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations.

Everything feels off, from the scale of the purpose-built set (which makes the cats look more like Borrowers) to the erratic interpretations of its musical numbers. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, in which mischievous cats trash a human house, is joyless and devoid of anarchy. Hudson’s 11th-hour ballad, Memory, feels like a desperate, last-ditch grasp towards something resembling pathos.

Regarding cats or humans, Hooper, it seems, has nothing to say. This is middlebrow film-making at its most hubristic; too inelegant to coast on spectacle alone, it’s not subversive enough to be considered truly camp either. I expect the film’s grab-bag celebrity cast and Christmas release date will secure its box-office success. The stage is on fire, but the show must go on.

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• Ian McKellen
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• Jennifer Hudson

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In 1939, T.S. Eliot published a book called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats , filled with poems he had written about cats to amuse his godchildren. A far cry from  The Waste Land , almost 20 years before, Eliot's poems are sweet and sneakily profound, detailing different kinds of cats, their behaviors, personalities, and mysterious self-involvement.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name.

Andrew Lloyd Webber took these poems, wove them together loosely, initially envisioning it as a concert or a chamber piece. Nobody saw the smash hit coming. How could you predict something like "Cats"' success? You couldn't. After a triumphant run in London, it moved to Broadway, where it promptly smashed every record in the book, becoming the fourth-longest running show in Broadway history. The appeal of the show is somewhat mysterious to me (and I've seen it twice. It was the second Broadway show I saw as a child), but obviously throngs of audiences have thrilled to it. Tom Hooper ("Les Miserables," " The King's Speech ") has brought "Cats" to the screen, not doing much to it (what's to be done, really?), and over-producing much of it (the sets feel self-consciously referential, almost to the point of irony, but not quite). He casts some big names like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Hudson , and fills it out with lesser-known performers, as well as an enchanting newcomer named Francesca Hayward , a principal ballerina at the Royal Ballet, who plays " Victoria ," the wide-eyed innocent cat thrust into a strange new world.

"Cats" features grown humans crawling around in furry suits pretending to be cats. There are some who will find this unbearably silly. Embarrassing even. I suggest these people never take an acting class or a movement class. They wouldn't last five minutes! "Cats" has a lot of issues, issues also present in the theatrical production (which didn't seem to matter to the audiences who flocked to it for 18 years). The story is thin, to say the least. There's almost no conflict. The structure of Cats is basically a talent show for cats, where the prize is a trip to the "Heavyside Layer" (i.e. "Heaven"), a place where the chosen cat moves on to the next of their (presumably) nine lives. It's a resurrection fantasy, a dream of cleansing and purification (all things which T.S. Eliot had very strong feelings about).

In the opening sequence, Victoria, abandoned by her owners, is taken under the collective wing of the gang of street cats known as "Jellicle cats." They sing a song explaining "Jellicle cats," but since the lyrics are almost totally incomprehensible during all the group numbers (a problem throughout, and it's inexcusable), it's hard to get a line on what is going on. Different cats take the spotlight, and perform a number about who they are. "Jennyanydots" ( Rebel Wilson ) is a lazy tabby who wreaks havoc at night. "Bustopher Jones" ( James Corden ) is a street cat decked out in tail-coat and spats. "Mr. Mistoffelees" ( Laurie Davidson ) does magic tricks. "Skimbleshanks" ( Steven McRae ) commandeers railway cars with the power of his tap-dancing. 

Over all of this jazz-hands talent-show activity looms the there-and-not-there Macavity ( Idris Elba ), perched on the tops of buildings like an ominous bat-signal. Macavity shows up to wreck everybody else's "act," for no discernible reason (he's got Iago's "motiveless Malignity," to quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Taylor Swift plays Bombalurina, Macavity's gun moll sidekick. Many of the cats do their number and are never seen again. "Old Deuteronomy" ( Judi Dench ) is the wise elder cat, and the master of ceremonies. (A nice callback: Judi Dench was cast in the original London production, in the dual role of Grizabella and Jennyanydots. In fact, Trevor Nunn refused to come on board as director unless Dench was cast. Dench dropped out at the last minute, after snapping her Achilles tendon. Her appearance here has a lot of resonance for those who know the history.) 

The central figure, besides Victoria, is Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), a bedraggled cat who's the "Delta Dawn" of the cat world, shunned by the rest of the cats for her disreputable past. Grizabella sings "Memory," a show-stopping song based (loosely), on Eliot's poem Rhapsody on a Windy Night . It's a song about memory and moonlight and ... honestly, I get a little lost, trying to follow what she's so upset about. But the song is about the music, not the words: it's written for a major voice, with its slow build and thrilling finish. (I saw Betty Buckley do it, and the entire audience practically seized up when she hit those notes on "Tooouch meeeeee!"). Hudson does not disappoint, filling the lyrics with rage and pathos. (Watch what she does with "I must wait for the sunrise." Hudson's Grizabella is pissed  when she sings that. Hudson makes sense of her character, personalizes the character, and sings the hell out of the song, all while wearing a cat suit. That's a pro.)

"Cats" suffers from a problem common in contemporary filmed musicals. The musical doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust that the dancing in and of itself is exciting enough to hold our interest. There are all these dance numbers in "Cats," and Hooper spends so much time cutting around, changing angles, flying up to the ceiling, manipulating the images. You're denied the sense of sustained movement, denied the simple pleasure of watching dancers dance. If you go back and watch musicals in the 1930s, it's instantly clear how much we have lost. You are allowed to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers create the dance together, in real time. The camera follows them. The takes are long. There are only a couple of sustained shots in "Cats," and they stand out for the pleasure they bring. There's one moment where Hayward pirouettes in a large circle around the room, and the camera follows her, and it's a lyrical moment of graceful fluid movement. She's allowed to do the beautiful thing she knows how to do, and we're privileged enough to watch.

There's not nearly enough of that in "Cats," but I enjoyed the film for what it is. It's "London's Got Talent" for the feline set.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Cats (2019)

Rated PG for some rude and suggestive humor.

110 minutes

Francesca Hayward as Victoria

James Corden as Bustopher Jones

Judi Dench as Deuteronomy

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger

Idris Elba as Macavity

Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella

Ian McKellen as Gus the Theater Cat

Taylor Swift as Bombalurina

Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots

Laurie Davidson as Mr. Mistoffelees

Mette Towley as Jemima

Robert Fairchild as Munkustrap

Steven McRae as Skimbleshanks

Ray Winstone as Growltiger

Larry Bourgeois as Plato

Laurent Bourgeois as Socrates

Zizi Strallen as Tantomile

Eric Underwood as Admetus

Melissa Madden-Gray as Griddlebone

Writer (poetry collection "Old Possum's Books of Practical Cats")

Writer (musical).

• Andrew Lloyd Webber

Cinematographer

• Christopher Ross
• Melanie Oliver

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Review: ‘Cats’ is a horror — and an occasional hoot

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There is a strange scene — OK, there are many strange scenes — near the end of “Cats,” the flailing feline phantasmagoria coming soon to a movie theater and/or shroom party near you. A bright new morning has dawned in London, and Old Deuteronomy, the wisest of the city’s scruffy tribe of jellicle cats, leans back to consider the surreal activities of the night before. Played by Judi Dench under what looks like a computer-animated shout-out to Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion mane, she sings a few lines of T.S. Eliot to the audience: “You’ve heard of several kinds of cat / And my opinion now is that / You should need no interpreter / to understand our character / You’ve learned enough to take the view / that cats are very much like you.”

It’s heartening to think that someone, somewhere, might learn something from “Cats.” The Oscar-winning English director Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech,” “Les Misérables”) and his cast and crew probably will emerge with the most valuable lessons of all, though I doubt many will be inclined to share them publicly. Still, if you see this movie — and I offer that up as a hypothetical, not a recommendation — and arrive at the theater not excessively inebriated, you will indeed learn about several different kinds of cat, with stripe and spot formations as impressively varied as their personality types and domestication levels.

There is a lazy, bumbling “gumbie cat” named Jennyanydots, who here takes the form of an orange-coated Rebel Wilson. A “bravo cat,” Growltiger, lives on a barge on the Thames and is played by that sexy beast Ray Winstone. There’s a top-hatted magician cat named Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson) and a nefarious “mystery cat” named Macavity (Idris Elba). In the opening scene, a shy, graceful white kitten named Victoria (Francesca Hayward) is rudely deposited in the London junkyard where all these jellicle cats prance and prowl. She plays the standard outsider role in this decidedly non-standard movie, serving as our cat eyes and ears on a wild night of singing, dancing, preening, licking, kidnapping, punning and other hallucinatory Razzie-courting mayhem.

If you are among the millions who have seen Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” — an improbable smash hit that ushered in the era of the Broadway blockbuster and remains one of the longest-running shows in history — then you are probably familiar with these characters already. If not, you will emerge from the theater fully in the know, with songs like “The Rum Tum Tugger” (that’s Jason Derulo) and “Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer” (Danny Collins and Naoimh Morgan, respectively) skittering around in your head like tiny human-faced cockroaches, to borrow one of this movie’s more disquieting visuals.

The plot is basically “Les Meowsérables.” While some jellicle cats enjoy the comforts of domesticity, as we see in a few scenes of cake-munching, pillow-shredding decadence, most of them are alley dwellers, forced to raid the garbage for scraps or break into the local milk bar at night. As in the stage show, most of the cats introduce themselves with a sung monologue that doubles as an audition, offered up in hopes that Old Deuteronomy will make them “the jellicle choice” — the cat destined to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and receive the gift of a new life.

And there is, to be sure, some representational value to be gleaned from these cats and their singing suicidal Olympics. Given how often the movies tend to stereotype felines as smug, pampered homebodies, there are certainly worse characters one could spend time with, though I am hard-pressed at the moment to think of many worse movies. I say this with zero hyperbole and the smallest kernel of admiration. For the most part, “Cats” is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious. Every so often it does paws — ahem, pause — to rise to the level of a self-aware hoot.

You may have seen the best of it already. The movie has been the long-tailed butt of online jokes for months, following the July release of a trailer whose deeply discomfiting imagery — showcasing bold new advances in what is being called “digital fur technology” — seemed to unite the internet in a collective outpouring of derision and delight. There was reason to suspect, if not hope, that the mockery might have been overblown, that the movie itself would not achieve or sustain the same degree of awfulness. Surely the human eye would gradually adjust over two hours (good God, two hours) to what it could scarcely process in two minutes.

Not quite, as it turns out. To return to Old Deuteronomy’s words: Are these cats really very much like us? “Cats” insists that they are, and therein lies its problem — well, one of them. These felines are disturbingly humanoid creations, their celebrity faces adorned with cat ears and grafted onto matted, long-tailed bodies. They sing, dance, walk upright and sometimes wear jewelry and coats made of fur that is probably not their own. Curiously enough, for all this talk of digital fur technology, there appears to be no fur on the cats’ actual digits, their unnervingly human fingers and toes. And just to round out this nightmarish anatomy lesson, Hooper often directs his actors to splay their legs and bare their flat, undifferentiated crotches for the camera, none more frequently than Dench’s Old Neuteronomy herself.

But surely this is all (more or less) true to Lloyd Webber’s theatrical conception, you may wonder, perhaps recalling your own memories of stage performers in elaborate furry unitards, punctuating their songs and dances with purrs, hisses and other semaphoric feline gestures. But that was the right aesthetic for that live performance medium; it was an example of how inventive stylization and stagecraft could bring a fantasy world to vivid life.

“Cats” the movie is predicated on no such rationale. As a filmmaker, Hooper has a tendency to pick one grandiose formal conceit and stick to it, with a bludgeoning lack of imagination or modulation. His insistence on live on-camera singing and in-your-face closeups turned “Les Misérables” into one of the more vocally and visually monotonous movie musicals of the past decade. With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, “Cats” is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice.

But then again, maybe this look was the appropriate choice for a movie in which making sense was the very last priority. At some point during “Cats” — I think I was trying to distract myself from the richly metaphorical image of James Corden sifting through garbage — it occurred to me that only one letter separates its title from Pixar’s “Cars,” to name another hermetically sealed, digitally polished, heavily anthropomorphized family-friendly entertainment set in a world from which actual human beings are creepily, apocalyptically absent. The burden of emoting, of bringing warmth and life to this CG-deadened nightscape, falls to the actors, some of whom perform and wear their feline physiognomies more gracefully than others.

Faring well enough is Ian McKellen’s Gus the Theater Cat, whose song about his glory days on the stage hits genuinely lovely notes of regret. Robbie Fairchild gives one of the movie’s more intuitive performances as Munkustrap, a jellicle guide who helps welcome Victoria onto the scene. For sheer musical proficiency, Taylor Swift is unsurprisingly best in show as Macavity’s henchwoman Bombalurina; she and Lloyd Webber also wrote an original song for the movie, “Beautiful Ghosts,” which the engaging Hayward shapes into an affecting rejoinder to the show’s signature tune, “Memory.” That song, sung by an aging jellicle outcast named Grizabella, falls regrettably flat here; that it’s being sung by an artist as talented as Jennifer Hudson makes it all the more bewildering, though her performance is admittedly of a bombastic piece with the movie she’s in.

“I remember / the time I knew what happiness was,” Grizabella sings. You will remember it, too, and you will know it again once you have ascended to your own Heaviside Layer, located just beyond the light of the exit sign.

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Rating: PG, for peril, some thematic elements and rude humor Running time: 2 hours Playing: Opens Dec. 20 in general release

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life. A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life. A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life.

• Andrew Lloyd Webber
• James Corden
• Jason Derulo
• 2.2K User reviews
• 261 Critic reviews
• 32 Metascore
• 11 wins & 8 nominations

• Bustopher Jones

• Old Deuteronomy

• Rum Tum Tugger

• (as Mette Towley)

• Mr. Mistoffelees

• Rumpleteazer

• Mungojerrie

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

The Cast of 'Cats' Play Our 'Cats Out of the Bag' Game

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Did you know

• Trivia On 21 December 2019, a mere two days after its release, Universal Pictures announced they would be releasing a new version with updated CGI at an undisclosed time.
• Goofs A few calico cats, including Mungojerrie, are male. Although the nature of chromosomes causes most calico cats to be female, it is a little known fact that male calico cats can exist, although they are extremely rare.

Victoria : But the memories were lost long ago. So I'll dance with these beautiful ghosts.

• Crazy credits The film opens without any opening credits. The title of the film is stated just before the closing credits.
• Alternate versions An "completely finished" version, which improves the VFX, replaces the "Early Preview" version with the use of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) that with downloaded onto a satellite server after the opening weekend, as demanded by Universal Studios International (UIP). Hard drives copies will be released at indie cinemas on Christmas Eve.
• Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Uh... Meow? (2019)
• Soundtracks Overture Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber

User reviews 2.2K

• GrantKanigan
• Dec 25, 2019
• How long is Cats? Powered by Alexa
• Is this film using live action, motion capture or animated?
• Is the cast singing live like it was in Les Miserables (2012)?
• What is a "jellicle"?
• December 20, 2019 (United States)
• United Kingdom
• United States
• Official Facebook
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• Những Chú Mèo
• Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, Warner Drive, Leavesden, Watford, Hertfordshire, England, UK (Studio)
• Working Title Films
• Amblin Entertainment
• Perfect World Pictures
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $95,000,000 (estimated)
• $27,166,770
• Dec 22, 2019
• $75,558,925

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos
• 12-Track Digital Sound
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• D-Cinema 96kHz 7.1

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‘Cats’ Film Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Feline Fantasy Musical Becomes a Garish Hairball

It’s hard to “ruin” Webber’s already strange musical, but Tom Hooper’s wrongheaded attempt certainly tries

The film of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” arrives without so much buzz as hisses thanks to a trailer released back in July which seemed to horrify more than to suggest a beloved fantasy musical that has, according to provided production information, been staged for over 81 million people in more than 50 countries and in 19 languages since its London premiere in 1981.

In its original theatrical presentation, “Cats” was weird, yes, but also an admirably immersive, intimate blend of junkyard pizzazz, busy makeup, leg warmers, T.S. Eliot rhymes and Webber earworms that, in its nonsensical Jellicle-osity, added up to something reasonably transportive. It never purred, but it pranced, preened and projected enough to be cat-video distracting, even as it augured decades of stage musicals that favored the flashy over the finely tuned.

But Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.

And it does enchant a few times, thanks to the ease with which Jennifer Hudson (as downtrodden Grizabella), Judi Dench (as regal Old Deuteronomy) and Ian McKellen (as, who else, the Theater Cat) growl some feeling into the heaving, disorienting strangeness. Like how Anne Hathaway was that oasis of soulfulness in Hooper’s deranged visual-aural hash of “Les Misérables.”

His “Cats” isn’t the same kind of bad, though, even as Hooper remains a terrible director of movies dependent on the effortless combining of song, performance, and movement. For all I know, he may even secretly hate musicals. But this “Cats,” rather than being some mistreated classic, is mostly a bizarro version of an already risky show that — unlike the Jellicle eventually chosen for ascendant rebirth in its threadbare narrative — never achieves lift-off.

Cats are elegant. This “Cats” isn’t. In fact, for a good while — starting with the opening, which introduces pearl-colored new stray Victoria (ballet superstar Francesca Hayward) to the turf felines who prowl 1930s’ London hoping to be anointed by Old Deuteronomy, and through numbers with Rebel Wilson (as showbiz-mad Jennyanydots), Jason Derulo (as self-centered Rum Tum Tugger) and James Corden (as gluttonous Bustopher) — it’s painful enough to make your heart race for everyone involved.

It’s one thing trying to get acclimated to the digi-furred humans, cartoonishly upscaled environments and choppily edited disrespect for Andy Blankenbuehler’s hormonal choreography. It’s another to feel abiding pity for committed performers, especially Wilson, tasked with cat puns and awkward body displays that Hooper films with something close to perverse contempt.

Hayward’s Victoria has been given the protagonist’s role — the stranger learning a new world — in Hooper’s and co-screenwriter Lee Hall’s reworking of a story-deficient show into something meagerly plotted. Never mind, one thinks: We’re here for razzle-dazzle.

And yet it’s abidingly odd that Hayward and the other dance-trained performers in key roles (like Tony-nominated Robert Fairchild and Royal Ballet Principal Steven McRae) never look entirely like real people doing real dances on real sets, so pervasive in saturated color and off-kilter depth and movement is the mood of CG artificiality rendered by DP Christopher Ross (“Yesterday”) and the effects team.

When even a simple shot of a vase teetering, falling and smashing looks animated (and badly so), one questions the authenticity of every catlike leap and bound, too, which starts to become a form of moviegoer madness as Hooper’s pathological visual restlessness keeps any sense of otherworldly wonder at bay.

When things slow down, though, for Hudson’s appealingly torchy “Memory,” Dench’s queenly countenance (in a role typically played onstage by a man) and shabby tabby McKellen making you believe he — and not (ahem) a mouse — is controlling his ears, Hooper briefly quashes his worst instincts, too.

It’s practically a pivot point, from full-on disaster to merely wrongheaded oddity. The Jellicle Ball sequence, which makes the best use of Eve Stewart’s distressed production design, at least feels grounded in a kind of school-play energy. And Taylor Swift’s strutting, gamely British-accented number about the show’s villain, Idris Elba’s Macavity, recalls the loony music-hall verve with which Ken Russell approached musicals. (Swift’s and Webber’s co-written new song “Beautiful Ghosts,” however, paired with “Memory” as an I-see-you response to Grizabella, is paradoxically unmemorable.)

As for Elba, snarly and green-eyed, the sinister play-acting is fine until he has to step lively at the end without his trenchcoat and is felled by that unflattering, photorealistic, skintight cat fur, like a Snapchat filter gone horribly wrong. It’s peculiar to think Elba looks better with his clothes on, but that’s where “Cats” has left us, folks — wishing for the simple pleasures of dressing-room greasepaint skills, fuzzy handmade costumes, and even those leg warmers while wanting to erase the sight of breast bumps and erect tails.

Eager cultists and the psychotropic-minded may lovingly feast on this “Cats” for years to come, and even children may feel they’ve learned a valuable lesson about the limits of the imagination. But for now (and to borrow its famed tagline, forever), this version is just a big swing and a hiss.

clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

‘The biggest disaster of the decade’: A roundup of the most memorable ‘Cats’ reviews

Since the Internet first laid eyes on the “Cats” trailer over the summer, the live-action-(esque) adaptation of the blockbuster musical has been the subject of delighted mocking and frenzied bewilderment.

Confused viewers wondered: Why do the cats have human lips, noses, hands and breasts? How come the Taylor Swift cat is dressed in a necklace, high heels and nothing else? What, exactly, is the scale here? What kind of fur coats are the ones worn by some of the cats? Are they … cat fur? How did so many big-name celebrities agree to be part of this? Did anyone ask for this movie to be made? No, really: Who thought this $95 million spectacle was a good idea?

On Friday, five months after the two-minute preview exploded into public consciousness, the movie made its debut in theaters. Alas, it seems the finished product answered precious few of the questions the trailer raised. It did, however, inspire a wave of absolutely scathing, especially creative reviews from critics, who were apparently as perplexed by the film as everyone else was by the trailer. And they had just as much of a field day with it.

The 34 questions we once had about ‘Cats,’ answered to the best of our ability

“To call Cats a cinematic experience unlike any other does not do justice to precisely how mind-meltingly bizarre Cats is,” wrote Mashable’s Angie Han. “To say it must be seen to be believed is to undersell just how hard it is to believe it even once you’ve seen it. Cats is a movie to make you feel sky-high even when you’re stone-cold sober, to push an otherwise even-keeled mind into Joker-like peals of hysterical random laughter.”

As of Friday evening, “Cats” had achieved a score of 20 percent on the movie-review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes , which offered this synopsis: “Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery.” Over at Metacritic , the movie didn’t fare much better, sitting at a 32 out of 100.

Reviewers had choice words for what they had just experienced. It was a “half-digested hair of a movie,” a “cinematic disaster of epic proportions,” a “nightmarish anatomy lesson.” One questioned whether director Tom Hooper had a “personal vendetta” against Andrew Lloyd Webber.

While there was scattered praise for the commitment of Hooper and the cast to their vision, the reviews took issue with the CGI technology, the thin plot, the overuse of the unexplained word “jellicle,” the cockroaches with children’s faces imposed on them, the strangely sexual energy of the cat-humans and even the original Broadway show underlying the movie.

‘Cats’ the movie is pretty crazy. But you already know that, and you don’t care.

Critics claimed they had to “resist the urge to remove a shoe to throw at the screen” or wanted to pray “for the sweet release of death” after tiring of “ cats singing about what kind of cat they are .”

Others wondered whether it was so bad it was actually good.

“ Cats is terrible, but it’s also kind of great,” read the headline on Stephanie Zacharek’s Time review.

Here are excerpts from some of the more memorable reviews.

‘Oh God, my eyes’: Ty Burr, Boston Globe

I truly believe our divided nation can be healed and brought together as one by “Cats” — the musical, the movie, the disaster. In other news, my eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.

… In fact, there are moments in “Cats” I would gladly pay to unsee, including the baby mice with faces of young girls and the tiny chorus line of cockroach Rockettes — again, with human faces — that Jennyanydots gleefully swallows with a crunch . Anyone who takes small children to this movie is setting them up for winged-monkey levels of night terrors.

Cats Is Terrible, But It’s Also Kind of Great: Stephanie Zacharek, Time

As people gazed at trailers for the film, straining to reckon with the vision of nude-looking cat people prancing around in fur that looked as if it had been airbrushed onto their skin, a collective wordless cry rang out through the Internet. It sounded like “Eww.”

But once you’re immersed in the full-strength version of Cats , you begin to view the fur-skin epidermal surface covering of its principals as normal, and this is when you know you’ve gone too far to be saved.

‘Cats’: A Broadway Musical Adaptation Straight Outta the Litter Box: Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Let the sheer grinding monotony of Cats stand as a measuring stick for future cinematic takes on Broadway musicals that hope to match its unparalleled, bottom-feeding dreadfulness. In his prize-winning Angels in America , playwright Tony Kushner wrote a scene in which the … lawyer Roy Cohn is on the phone sucking up to a client who wants tickets to a Broadway smash. When the caller says, “ Cats ,” Cohn sticks his fingers down his throat and mock vomits. Look for that gesture to be repeated by all who must endure this hellish fiasco of a film version. This disaster of a movie shouldn’t happen to a dog.

Cats Review: I Have Seen Sights No Human Should See: Alex Cranz, i09

I have been processing this movie for the last 24 hours trying to understand anything as terrifying and visceral a trainwreck as Cats . You have to see Cats .

You must witness the hubris of director Tom Hooper. You must witness the hubris of Hollywood. The hubris of these performers. You have to sit in that theater and view this fur-festooned thing so that years from now you might heroically say that you were there. You saw it in its infancy before it became a cult oddity like another bizarre and inept, but thoroughly watchable, feline-centric film: Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House .

One to furget: Cats movie review — Ludicrous, pointless and quite frankly — simply not good enough: Jamie East, the Sun

When the trailer got released, the reaction was frenzied. People laughed, hysterical at the oddness of the whole thing. Are they people dressed as cats? Cats dressed as people? Why are some cats wearing hats?

Is that a cat-sized fork it’s holding with its … human hand? Oh God the teeth!

Are all the cast being held hostage? Who thought this was a good way to spend $95 million?

Reader, none of those questions get answered, including the most pressing — where are their bumholes? Why? Well, because absolutely jack all happens in this film.

‘Cats’ review: This is one weird furball of a movie: Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times

Sometimes, you watch a movie just feeling your brow furrow. If I look older this week, you can thank “Cats” the movie, which I watched in what can only be described as shellshocked puzzlement, as questions rose up around me. Why do all the cats stand like they’re in a Bob Fosse show? Why is the scale of things so weirdly inconsistent — in the same scene, one cat successfully wears human shoes while another wears a human ring as a bracelet? Why is one cat, and only one, wearing pants? What is Idris Elba doing here? And am I understanding the plot correctly: These cats are all vying to go to the Heavyside Layer, which basically means that the winner, um, dies?

Cats is what you’d see if your third eye suddenly opened: Karen Han, Polgyon

The facts are these: Cats undermines itself in both editing and musical arrangement, barely has a plot to hang its hat on, and is CGI-ed into oblivion. Yet there’s something weirdly wonderful about just how committed Hooper is to his vision, which feels like it should have been audience-tested into something less phantasmagorical. (It’s a little like Welcome to Marwen in that sense — the movie isn’t great, but it’s certainly memorable, and the result of someone seeing a startling and unorthodox vision through until the bitter end.) Cats also serves as a fitting end to 2019, as a death knell to irony. There’s not a drip of it to be found among these felines, and it’s impossible to hang onto it in the face of such total Cats conviction, either.

Nine may not be enough lives for some of the stars to live down their involvement in this poorly conceived and executed adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical: Peter Debruge, Variety

“The King’s Speech” director Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie). From the first shot — of just such a blue moon, distressingly fake, flanked by poufy cat-shaped clouds — to the last, “Cats” hurts the eyes and, yes, the ears, as nearly all the musical numbers, including “Memory,” have been twisted into campy, awards-grubbing cameos for big-name stars in bad-CG cat drag.

Watching ‘Cats’ Is Like a Descent into Madness: Matt Goldberg, Collider

For a moment, let’s put the musical itself in a box and set it off to the side. We have to accept that a musical that ran on Broadway for decades has some kind of popularity or else it’s just a giant money laundering scheme (I’m not completely willing to rule out the latter possibility). For whatever reason, people have been drawn to Cats , so now it makes sense to adapt it into a movie. However, that movie is such a monument to directorial malpractice that Hooper should get a life sentence in director jail.

… Tom Hooper’s direction to his actors for this semblance of a plot was to act it super horny . That doesn’t give Cats a raw sexual energy as much as it makes everything incredibly uncomfortable like when Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) is dumping milk into cats’ faces or Macavity just seems more nude than other cats even though technically all the cats are nude. But if it wasn’t enough to make the cats horny ( why are they so horny ), Hooper also feels the need to make it gross by having them dig through trash and play up their animal instincts. Cats always feels like it’s two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster. That’s the energy you have to sit with for almost two hours.

Review: Me-ouch! Film version of ‘Cats’ a Deuteronomy disaster: Adam Graham, Detroit News

Let’s start with the positive: the costumes and makeup are pretty good? In a weird, body-horror, human-feline-dysmorphia kind-of-way, the characters in “Cats” certainly come close to a particular vision of, well, catpeople?

But that’s the best that can be said about “Cats,” the baffling film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s popular stage musical, an astonishing misfire on every other conceivable level. Forget worst movie of the year: “Cats” is the biggest disaster of the decade, and possibly thus far in the millennium. It’s “Battlefield Earth” with whiskers.

‘Cats’ Is Impossible to Review: Adam Nayman, the Ringer

As I can think of no more culturally resonant image for the end of 2019 than James Corden diving face-first into a dumpster containing CGI garbage and rooting around for five agonizing minutes, I’m tempted to call Cats an accidental masterpiece: not the Christmas blockbuster we need, but the one that we deserve.

Why exactly did so many people like ‘Cats’ in the first place?

Will ‘Cats’ be a fresh Christmas phenomenon or a holiday bomb?

The new ‘Cats’ trailer is here. It’s time to discuss these cat bodies.

'Cats' reviews: Critics call the all-star musical 'cat-tastrophic,' 'outlandishly tacky'

The cat's out of the bag.

Reviews are rolling in for Tom Hooper's movie musical "Cats"  – out Friday, starring the furry cast of Taylor Swift, James Corden, Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson and Jason Derulo – and critics are mostly in agreement that the star-studded ensemble cast couldn't save what The Hollywood Reporter calls  a "Cat-tastrophic" film. 

"Cats" has a  Metacritic  rating of 31 out of 100 and is listed as 14% fresh on  Rotten Tomatoes as of Wednesday evening.

USA TODAY's Brian Truitt says the movie musical version of the Broadway hit was "utterly absurd yet oddly charming movie," despite inconsistent visual effects that border on creepy. 

"'Cats' isn’t for everyone – much of it is a cheesy, B-grade affair seemingly crafted solely to take over midnight-movie slots from 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show,'" he writes. "Those with an open mind, though, as well as little kids and the T-Swift posse, might find it somewhat pawesome."

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Review: All-star 'Cats' stays out of the litter box with Taylor Swift and enchanting absurdity

But other critics clawed harder.

Variety's  Peter Debruge describes the film as "outlandishly tacky," adding that the classic musical numbers are "twisted into campy, awards-grubbing cameos for big-name stars in bad-CG cat drag."

"Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie in which Hooper spends too much energy worrying about whether the technology is ready to accommodate his vision and not enough focusing on what millions love about the musical in the first place," Debruge adds.

Indie Wire's  Eric Kohn agreed, adding that the cast was "so keen on upstaging one another with excessive song-and-dance numbers they may as well be competing for a Heaviside Layer of their own," a feline heaven in the film where cats are reborn.

As for Swift's new song 'Beautiful Ghosts'?" Kohn calls it "forgettable."

 'Cats': Everything Taylor Swift says, does and sings in her unhinged new movie musical

Hollywood Reporter's  David Rooney couldn't get over the "generally off-putting appearance of the cats," a common critique among critics, especially Elba's overtly nude Macavity. 

"If you recoiled… at the sight of British acting royalty with their faces stuck onto little furry bodies, or even just the jarring image of cats with human breasts, chances are you'll still be covering your eyes and peering in a profoundly disturbed state through the gaps between your fingers at the finished film," Rooney says. "At least until boredom sets in."

More 'Cats': Everything Taylor Swift says, does and sings in her unhinged new movie musical

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Common sense media reviewers.

Big-screen musical adaptation is both strange and magical.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Messages include letting go of the pain of the pas

A wise cat who has lived "many lives" is unwilling

A sneaky, creepy, conniving cat tries to use magic

Rude and suggestive behavior. No explicit sexualit

Some suggestive language, but no swearing.

A wealthy cat boasts/brags a bit about his provisi

Cats have catnip.

Parents need to know that Cats is based on Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical of the same name (which, in turn, was based on T.S. Eliot's poetry). The story takes place all in one night as a tribe of cats called the Jellicles gather together for a ball and celebration. While there's no overt violence,…

Positive Messages

Messages include letting go of the pain of the past, recognizing value of new beginnings, embracing the reality that you belong after a life of abandonment and rejection. Themes include compassion, empathy, courage.

Positive Role Models

A wise cat who has lived "many lives" is unwilling to compromise, won't grant a new life to a cat with a dark heart; it has to be a cat with a good soul who genuinely needs a new beginning. A kitten doesn't judge an old, rejected cat who's past their glory; rather, she shows compassion, encourages this dejected cat to find courage to believe in herself and possibility of better life. A kitten is empathetic to others' needs, despite her own issues with abandonment. A shy magician finds courage to believe in his own magic. An older, disgraced cat acknowledges her pain but presses past it anyway -- and, as a result, gains an incredible opportunity.

Violence & Scariness

A sneaky, creepy, conniving cat tries to use magic and sorcery to win a chance at a new life. He ties up other cats and threatens to throw Old Deuteronomy into deep waters. A mean, dangerous cat is thrown into the water.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Rude and suggestive behavior. No explicit sexuality, but human actors' bodies are made to appear sensuously feline-like -- especially the female ones, which often seem to be positioned very sexually and moving in a sexual manner. While there are no crude acts of any kind, there's a bit of sexual innuendo.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A wealthy cat boasts/brags a bit about his provisions. Cats is an established brand.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Cats is based on Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical of the same name (which, in turn, was based on T.S. Eliot's poetry). The story takes place all in one night as a tribe of cats called the Jellicles gather together for a ball and celebration. While there's no overt violence, sexual content, or strong language, a conniving cat does tie up other cats and threatens them, characters speak suggestively at times, and the "digital fur" technology used for the film results in the actors' human bodies appearing sensuously feline-like -- especially those of the female cats/characters. Plus, some of the cats wear clothes while others don't, so some are technically naked. But themes include compassion, empathy, and courage, and the all-star cast -- including Taylor Swift , James Corden , Rebel Wilson , Jason Derulo , Francesca Hayward , Idris Elba , and Judi Dench -- are committed to their performances. Tween and teen musical theater fans will likely be quite entertained. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (65)
• Kids say (98)

Based on 65 parent reviews

Why is everyone Hating?

Actually really nice movie don't let the promotion fool you, what's the story.

Director Tom Hooper 's adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's long-running musical CATS (which, in turn, was based on T.S. Eliot's 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ) stays true to the original production, which first debuted on May 11, 1981. The story follows a tribe of cats called the Jellicles over the course of one night as they prepare to present themselves to Old Deuteronomy ( Judi Dench ) in hopes of being chosen as the one cat who will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life. Abandoned as a small kitten but full of love and empathy, Victoria ( Francesca Hayward ) longs to belong. Rejected and full of pain over a life passed, Grizabella ( Jennifer Hudson ) must muster the courage to embrace new beginnings. And an entire tribe of cats comes to learn that life has a way of figuring itself out, whether in this one or the next.

Is It Any Good?

Though it teeters on the verge of being strange, there's still something quite magical and elegant about Hooper's adaptation of Webber's classic show. Bringing a musical from stage to screen is no easy feat, but he pulls it off. That said, for those who aren't familiar with musical theater, acting for the stage, or the performing arts in general, the movie may at times be tough to follow. The pace is frequently slow, and the backstory and character development could be more detailed. But theater lovers new and old will appreciate this take on the popular musical -- and considering that it's been many years since Cats closed on Broadway, the movie is a great way to introduce a new generation to Eliot and Webber's work. The old-world feel, dimly lit set design, and rustic vibe are refreshing. Some of the CGI affects can feel unrealistic, but the beautiful vocals, the synchronized dance sequences, and the story's touching messages help make up for that. The soundtrack is very appropriate, soft and beautiful.

But how's the cast? Well, Hudson, Hayward, and Jason Derulo are definite standouts in their roles. As Rum Tum Tugger, Derulo is lively and entertaining, a scene stealer. As Grizabella, Hudson demonstrates great emotional range and gets to show off her stellar vocals. Hayward has a meek innocence as Victoria that lends itself to great vulnerability and transparency on-screen; she's lovely to watch. As Macavity, Idris Elba is a stretch, but his ability to take on his character's cynicism and dark nature shows his range. James Corden as Bustopher Jones is entertaining to say the least, and Taylor Swift as Bombularina is fun, seductive, and naughty -- her take on the character just works. Watching Rebel Wilson commit to playing Jennyanydots is lots of fun, and veteran actress Dench is quite fitting as the wise sage Old Deuteronomy. The dance choreography, paired with the songs, helps the entire ensemble shine. Seeing all these classically trained dancers and singers perform offers a positive example for kids and young adults, proving that hard work and discipline have benefits. And the movie's positive themes -- finding the courage to let go of pain, embracing new beginnings, and understanding that you belong -- are worth noting. It can be strange and over the top, but Cats is also unique, and there's something to be said for that.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about some of Cats ' major themes, including the idea of an underdog getting a new beginning. In what ways are Victoria and Grizabella given a new beginning in this movie? What are some of the obstacles that they overcome?

Though a kitten, Victoria has a compassionate heart. In what ways does Victoria show empathy and compassion for Grizabella? In what way does Victoria inspire Grizabella to try to live again? In what ways does Grizabella eventually show courage ?

Old Deuteronomy is a very wise cat who's had the opportunity to live many lives. In her old age and wisdom, what character strengths does she display? In the movie, she rejects the request of the always conniving Macavity. What does her decision to deny his request say about her integrity ?

In the movie, the entire cast works as an ensemble. What is an ensemble? In what ways does working as an ensemble require humility , discipline, and teamwork ?

The performing arts are heavily featured in the film. How do dancing, singing, and poetry contribute to the production?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 20, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : April 7, 2020
• Cast : Judi Dench , Jennifer Hudson , Idris Elba , James Corden , Taylor Swift
• Director : Tom Hooper
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Musical
• Topics : Cats, Dogs, and Mice , Music and Sing-Along
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Courage , Empathy
• Run time : 110 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : some rude and suggestive humor
• Last updated : March 1, 2024

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The Cats Movie Is a Void of Horny Confusion

The new adaptation understands that the uncoolness is the point..

With the release of Tom Hooper’s Cats movie adaptation, the public has a new opportunity to do what theater snobs and comedy writers have never stopped doing over the past 40 years: make fun of Cats . Adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber from the poems of T.S. Eliot’s  Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats , the stage musical became an unexpected sensation on Broadway and around the globe despite—or perhaps because of—its odd premise, which involves a group of cats called Jellicles gathering in London to introduce themselves before deciding which of them will be allowed to travel up to the Heaviside layer and be reborn into a new life. That flimsy plot, coupled with the silliness of grown men and women writhing around in leotards meowling and licking themselves, has opened it up to no end of mockery.

I suspect that Hooper’s version of Cats will be met with the same amount of gleeful bafflement as the stage show, if the ( overblown ) horror over the movie’s “digital fur technology” when the trailer was released in July is any indication.* Hooper responded to the criticism by dialing back the fur so the characters look more human, and the movie is better off for it, though still a little unsettling. (Just when you think you’ve reasonably settled into the uncanny valley, Idris Elba’s coat comes off and you’re sucked even deeper into a void of horny confusion.) The hoopla over the trailer put Hooper in an awkward position, because if Cats is not completely weird, can it rightfully still be called Cats ? It’s not my favorite musical by a long shot, nor is it even Lloyd Webber’s best. But Cats ’ uncoolness, its willingness to be silly and self-serious and spectacular at the expense of taste, is its greatest strength, and Hooper’s version understands this.

That’s not to say that he treats the original as a sacred text. His and co-writer Lee Hall’s screenplay (though both Lloyd Webber and the author of “The Waste Land” share credits) responds to the most common complaint about Cats —its supposed lack of plot—by padding it. Their version follows kitten Victoria (ballet dancer Francesca Hayward), who in the opening scenes is abandoned in a junkyard by a woman we only see from the ankles down. (Though the scale of the city suggests that humans do also live there, that’s the most of them that ever appears on camera.) There Victoria learns about the Jellicle ball from Munkustrap (fellow ballet dancer Robbie Fairchild) and other cats, though she doesn’t yet know what a Jellicle is or whether she is one. The competition this year has a saboteur: Macavity (Elba), who uses magic to kidnap all the other contestants so that wise Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench) has no choice but to choose him.

Though Cats is traditionally a sung-through musical, Hooper, perhaps haunted by criticism of the relentless live singing in his adaptation of Les Misérables , sprinkles in some spoken interludes to break up the songs, mostly expository dialogue and uninspired cat (and in the case of James Corden’s character, fat cat) jokes. Alas, there are some wounds that no amount of laughter can heal: While theater pros like Fairchild pull off the live singing just fine, I cannot say the same for some of the more famous faces in the cast, such as Rebel Wilson and Jason Derulo, whose back-to-back songs early on constitute the movie’s roughest stretch. Fortunately, it recovers, and the songs that follow—and the dancing from the professionally trained portion of the cast—are giddy and gorgeous, particularly “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat,” which sees them tap-dancing along a railroad track, and “Mr. Mistoffelees,” which Hooper reimagines to give the number more emotional heft. His signature close-up, low-angle shots are ideal for Jennifer Hudson’s rendition of “Memory” (which is about as powerful as you’d expect from that combination of singer and song) and Victoria singing the new, Taylor Swift–penned response song, “ Beautiful Ghosts ,” sung by Hayward (which is competent and sweet, if forgettable).

Die-hard fans of Cats will probably walk away with plenty of quibbles—like the choice to minimize the role of Rum Tum Tugger (Derulo), the contrarian cat, whose song is infuriatingly interrupted by dialogue despite being one of the best in the musical—while newcomers hoping to finally understand what all the Cats fuss is all about will probably walk away with more questions than answers. These questions will include Why do some cats have magic and others don’t? and Who built this human-size bar that seems to serve only milk? and How has an hour gone by without an appearance from Taylor Swift? and Why on earth does this movie exist? When Swift does finally show up as sultry Bombalurina, it’s with the confidence that only a true cat lover can embody—but it’s 80-year-old Ian McKellen who can best answer that last question, having the most fun of anyone as Gus the Theater Cat, lapping out of saucers and rubbing up against corners like the true thespian he is. And really, for all its flaws, what more could you possibly ask for from Cats ?

Correction, Dec. 18, 2019: This post originally misstated that the Cats trailer was released in October. It was released in July.

These Brutal Cats Reviews Are Better Than the Actual Movie

There is no shortage of feline puns.

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There are good reviews, there are bad reviews, and then there are the Cats reviews.

The reviews for Cats —which, in an unsettling coincidence, broke the same time as the impeachment vote—are absolutely brutal, ranging from unsatisfied to downright disturbed. What I could have only best described as "freaky" and "a hot fever dream," film critics have characterized as "a monstrosity," "a descent into madness," and "nearly as obscene as The Human Centipede ."

Now, it's easy to assume the writers are overreacting. Maybe they're taking the film too seriously, or maybe they don't understand that Andrew Lloyd Weber's original theatrical masterpiece—which itself is an adaptation of T.S. Eliot's 1939 collection of feline poems —transcends practical narrative structure. But, as someone who watched the musical on VHS growing up, sung along with the Broadway cast recording, and crawled around an auditorium in furry spandex for my own high school's production of the musical, I can assure you, they're not.

My school's rendition of Cats in 2010 was interrupted by a minor fire onstage due to a pyrotechnic accident during the Mr. Mistoffelees number, which caused some audience members to evacuate mid-production (no one was hurt; the show went on like nothing happened). And yet somehow I was more terrified—and, I'll admit, sometimes giddy—watching Tom Hooper's digitally-enhanced film adaptation during a press screening this week.

Does this mean you shouldn't watch Cats at all? No. You should absolutely watch Cats . If you're a diehard fan of the show, you'll ogle at the choreography and sing "The Rum Tum Tugger" in your seat. Although the digitized film cannot compare to the bewilderingly entertaining live performance, it is definitely the kind of movie you just need to experience yourself.

But if you're only here for the bad reviews, read the roughest (and funniest) ones below—if you can stomach all of the hairball and litter box puns.

We Watched Cats on Opening Night and Lost All Nine Lives — The staff of Jezebel .

Cats : A Broadway Musical Adaptation Straight Outta the Litter Box — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone . Plus this dek: "This disastrous attempt to bring Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical to the screen shouldn’t happen to a dog."

Cats Is Good. Cats Is Bad. Cats Is Cats . — Alison Willmore, Vulture . In the review itself, she adds, "To assess Cats as good or bad feels like the entirely wrong axis on which to see it. It is, with all affection, a monstrosity."

Cats review: a sinister, all-time disaster from which no one emerges unscathed — Tim Robey (who gave the film zero stars), The Telegraph .

Cats review – a purr-fectly dreadful hairball of woe — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian .

Watching Cats Is Like a Descent into Madness — Matt Goldberg, Collider .

Cats Review: I Have Seen Sights No Human Should See — Alex Crans, io9 .

Cats Is A Nightmare That Won't End — Jill Gutowitz, ELLE.com .

The Cats Movie Is a Boring Disaster Filled With Joyless Pussies — Kevin Fallon, Daily Beast .

The movie Cats doesn’t even know what the musical Cats is about — Aja Romano, Vox .

Cats review: Movie musical is a total disaster — Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post . His lede, however, is the real kicker: "Please wipe this movie from my 'Memory.'"

Cats Review: A Tragical Mess of Mistoffelees — Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair .

Cats review: You won't leave the theater purring — Rafer Guzmán, Newsday .

Cats Film Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Feline Fantasy Musical Becomes a Garish Hairball — Robert Abele, The Wrap .

Cats Is Impossible to Review — Adam Nayman, The Ringer .

Cats Review: Going to the Dogs — John Anderson, The Wall Street Journal .

Cats leaves behind a memory that's best forgotten — Brian Lowry, CNN .

Cats review — musical mess is one for the litter tray — Kevin Maher, The Times .

Oh God, my eyes — Ty Burr, The Boston Globe .

Cats review: Nearly as obscene as The Human Centipede — David Sexton, The Evening Standard .

Cats : Spay It — Scott Tobias NPR .

Other pieces with tamer titles contained gems in the text, like this nugget from Manohla Dargis of The New York Times : "[Hooper’s] mistake is that he’s tried to class up the joint. What a blunder!"

And there's brutal blow from Peter Debruge of Variety :

"Sadly, this uneven eyesore turns out to be every bit the Jellicle catastrophe the haters anticipated, a half-digested hairball of a movie in which Hooper spends too much energy worrying about whether the technology is ready to accommodate his vision and not enough focusing on what millions love about the musical in the first place."

And this from Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly :

"Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything — except that C is for Cats , C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all."

The one from Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times too:

"There is a strange scene — OK, there are many strange scenes — near the end of 'Cats,' the flailing feline phantasmagoria coming soon to a movie theater and/or shroom party near you."

Erica Gonzales is the Senior Culture Editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage on TV, movies, music, books, and more. She was previously an editor at HarpersBAZAAR.com. There is a 75 percent chance she's listening to Lorde right now. 

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Cats: The Musical

Critics reviews, audience reviews, cast & crew.

David Mallet

Elaine Page

Elaine Paige

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Cats Broadway Reviews

Reviews of Cats on Broadway. See what all the critics had to say and see all the ratings for Cats including the New York Times and More...

Critics' Reviews

First Nighter: You Better Believe That the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Trevor Nunn-T. S. Eliot “Cats” is Now and Forever

It's undoubtedly coincidence that Cats arrives on cats' feet just after the national political conventions have concluded. Patrons seeing it this week and in the weeks to come may find themselves reminded of those congregations. Truth to tell, they're more likely to see the Democrat Convention echoed rather than the Republican Convention. The diversity of the former outshines the divisiveness of the latter-the many unison dance routines being a visual metaphor for cohesion and promise. And it may be that when Grizabella, a woman, is selected to rise to new heights, more than a few spectators will flash on the Democrat's 2016 nominee ascending to her next vaunted level.

Theater Review: 'Cats'

It's kitschy and fun, sometimes quite touching, and marvelously well done. It'll likely be very nostalgic for anyone who saw the show before, and, I'm guessing, a treat for people who haven't, and don't go expecting a profound theatrical experience. 'Cats' is a one-of-a-kind entertainment, and I can't imagine a young, budding theater-lover, in particular, not being entranced.

Review: Does ‘Cats’ Have Nine Lives on Broadway? Two, Certainly

The overriding spirit of the revival appears to be the familiar motto: Don't mess with success. Once again, the production is directed by Trevor Nunn, with sets and costumes by John Napier. Once again, a Broadway theater has been transformed into a grungy London junkyard, where trash piles up against the walls and spills out into the auditorium - albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. That levitating tire, as famous a set piece as a certain falling chandelier, presides once again at the back of the stage. (Apparently the license plate on the battered car, which reads 'NAP 70,' is an in-joke indicating how many productions Mr. Napier has designed. Imagine how many leg warmers have been involved.)

‘Cats': now and forever. Again.

And whatever other misgivings you might have, wading through the thin story of the ascension of Grizabella the Glamour Cat (British vocalist Leona Lewis) to the redemptive Heaviside Layer, the cast assembled for the revival is gangbusters. Andy Blankenbuehler, the Tony-winning choreographer of 'Hamilton,' has been recruited to tweak the dances of 'Cats's' original choreographer, Gillian Lynne (another Tony winner). His refinements inject precision and verve and allow several of the performers, in their equitably distributed spotlight moments, to show off grandly. Among the most exciting are Ricky Ubeda as the magician cat, Mistoffelees; Tyler Hanes, playing Rum Tug Tugger, the rock-and-roll cat, and Jess LeProtto and Shonica Gooden as the mischief makers Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer.

‘Cats’ Broadway revival: Classic musical is back but not better

The revival could be better in some respects. The original production provided a more transporting experience because it played on a wider stage, which increased the intimacy, and its theater was more extensively transformed to suit the show's unique physical environment. Musically, the size of the orchestra has been cut in half.

'Cats' Gets a Second Life on Broadway

'Cats' is full of catchy pop tunes many of us have known for decades. Webber's songs don't have the tightest of melodies, but I'll take 'Cats' over 'School of Rock' any day. As a wistful recollection, 'Cats' is guaranteed to leave you feline groovy-it's here now, though I wouldn't bet on it lasting forever.

Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’ Returns to Broadway

Memories could be fatal to this revival of 'Cats' - specifically, the memory of Betty Buckley as Grizabella, singing 'Memory' as it's meant to be sung, with heartbreaking beauty and exquisite pain by a great stage performer. Leona Lewis, the British pop star anointed by Andrew Lloyd Webber himself, isn't in her league. Happily, nothing as catty can be said of the rest of this fabulous revival of the 1981 musical phenom that padded its way around the world on little cats' feet.

Theater Review: The Persistence of “Memory,” and the Return of Cats

To be fair, Cats is not quite as bad as cultural elites liked to suggest; there were far worse shows during its 18-year run. But Cats was both pretentious and déclassé, dragging the musical form down from its recent supposed glory just as it dragged Eliot down from Prufrock to Pouncival. This was, after all, the megahit that opened the door for the invasion of European pop operas that all but smothered the native product for two decades. Seeing it 34 years later, in a Broadway environment that has recently produced the likes of Hamilton and Fun Home, is to experience something milder and less dangerous than it once seemed. It's not so much feline as bovine, as if Nunn and Lloyd Webber had spliced in some genetic material from another Eliot poem of the same period: 'Cows.'

BWW Review: Charming CATS Revival Is Packed With Terrific Performances

Pop star Leona Lewis has been cast as Grizabella, the cat of tragically faded glamour who sings the musical's dramatic 11 o'clocker, 'Memory.' She has no acting credits in her bio and it shows, making the evening's climactic moment a sad letdown, especially when considering the many underused Broadway actresses who can really make a meal out of it.

'Cats': Theater Review

Although it remains to be seen whether this revival will live up to the original production's tagline of 'Now and Forever,' enough time has passed for a new generation of theatergoers to embrace the show, while those who saw the original (and liked it) will probably want to return for a blast of nostalgia. And with the dramatic upturn in tourists to the Big Apple in recent years, there's no reason to think that this Cats won't be purring on Broadway for a very long time.

‘Cats’ review: Beloved Broadway musical leaps back onstage

Best of all is the refreshed choreography by Tony winner Andy Blankenbuehler ('Hamilton') who has replaced Gillian Lynne's compilation of stock moves with variety and invention. Except for a preponderance of butt-waving, the taffy-jointed dancers have some of the angular, sudden, inexplicable moves of catliness. Highlights include balletic Georgina Pazcoguin, all in white, who moves as if she loves being in her skin, and Ricky Ubeda as Mr. Mistoffelees, who unspools turns and leaps with soft-paw landings.

Cats review – kitsch, dated … yet strangely adorable

Lewis has a beautiful voice, but when she performed Memory, she was not Grizabella the mangy old cat, but Leona Lewis, pop star and seller of 20m records, just as, a few years ago, when Catherine Zeta Jones played Desiree in A Little Night Music (also directed by Nunn) she busted out of role to sing Send in the Clowns with the zip of the Incredible Hulk busting out of his shirt. Perhaps this doesn't matter. A song sung on these terms can still be highly enjoyable, although in this case I found the performance of Memory rather stressful, particularly the crescendo at the end and the bits when Lewis listed dangerously to one side while doing some Acting. It was a relief when the story moved on.

Cats: EW stage review

I have a bone to pick with Andrew Lloyd Webber about Cats. For the past few days, since I saw the first-ever Broadway revival at the Neil Simon Theatre, that's all I've had running through my head. And I'm not talking about 'Memory,' the showstopper made famous by Barbra Streisand before Cats even opened on Broadway in 1982. I mean the almost hypnotically repetitive prologue 'Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats'; the jazzy, doo-wop ode to Jennyanydots, 'The Old Gumbie Cat'; and the singsongy 'Magical Mister Mistoffelees' ('Oh! Well I never! Was there ever a cat so clever...'). Will anything - short of the 'It's a Small World' theme song - banish these insistent melodies from my brain?

Cats: Leona Lewis brings glitz but no grit to her Broadway debut

Directed by Trevor Nunn, and choreographed by the great Gillian Lynne, this Cats remains an evening of fluff and nonsense, really, with leg-warmers and cutesy costumes that should be risible to a cynic's eyes. Yet such is the innate confidence and innocent zest of this bizarre, feline spectacle that all cynicism just moults away.

‘Cats’ Broadway Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Hit Is Back for a 10th Life

...the production's hopes of updating one of Broadway's more maligned hits - and justifying its popularity - seems to have floated up to the Heaviside Layer that these cats so desperately crave. This revival provokes but one response to the show's onetime tagline: now and whatever.

'Cats,' Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical starring Leona Lewis, didn't need another life on Broadway

The whisker of a plot and lyrics are drawn from T.S. Eliot's 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.' A posse of pusses gather to see which one gets a shot at a new life. Who could it be? The Rum Tum Tugger (Tyler Hanes), who struts like a rock star? Twinkled-toed Jennyanydots (Eloise Kropp)? The frisky and nimble Skimbleshanks (Jeremy Davis)? The amazing often airborne Mistoffelees (Ricky Ubeda)? Or a dozen others? It's not much of a spoiler that it's shunned and bedraggled outcast Grizabella (Leona Lewis). After all, she gets 'Memory.' Too bad she inspires so little sympathy. The show's first tagline was 'now and forever.' More fitting for 'Cats' 2.0 - now and whatever.

Broadway review: Cats at the Neil Simon Theater

Today, Cats feels experimental only in the sense of writing a show as if Oklahoma! and Company never happened. Lloyd Webber's ability to craft a coherent book musical has always been shaky (School of Rock being a late-career exception to the rule). Cats is an attenuated high-concept revue that grows tedious by its second act. A bunch of cats slink out one night, introduce themselves and, by the end, two of them go to kitty heaven. Now and then you may catch a word not normally heard on Broadway: 'ineffable' or 'perpendicular.'

Recommended For You

‘Cats’: A Broadway Musical Adaptation Straight Outta the Litter Box

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Attention, moviegoers searching for the worst movie of the year: We have a late-breaking winner. Cats slips in right under the radar and easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel — and arguably of the decade. Even Michael Bay’s trash trilogy of soul-destroying Transformers movies can’t hold a candle. What happened?

Wasn’t the stage production of Cats — music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by poet T.S. Eliot — an award-winning smash from Broadway to Tokyo? It was. But in this all-star, all-awful screen version, directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech’s , Les Miserables ), everything that should work goes calamitously wrong. The first trailer earned hisses on social media. The full movie, inert and as indigestible as a hairball, is much, much worse.

Shot on a soundstage to suggest a bad feline-themed Halloween party, the film — like the show — is based on Eliot’s beloved 1939 poetry collection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. That means that over a single night in London, a tribe of junkyard cats called Jellicles run a talent show to prove their worthiness to the chief judge, Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench, a Dame who deserved better). The prize? The chosen feline will ascend to cat heaven, known as the Heaviside Layer, and be reborn into a better life where presumably no one will ever be forced to sit through this movie.

Talent is misused all through the film: There’s Sir Ian McKellan as Gus the Theater Cat, singing of his lost youth; Idris Elba as Macavity, the monster of depravity; and — God help her — Taylor Swift as Bombalurina, his accomplice in crime. Hooper traps the actors in an airless, lifeless bubble of a film that scarcely gives them room to breathe, much less develop a character. Instead, he misguidedly covers them in digital fur and bizarre makeup.

The opening number about Jellicle cats, in which the word “Jellicle” is repeatedly drilled into your ears until you want to cry for mercy, serves as a warning of the punishment ahead. Dreamgirls Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson fares best at pretending she’s in something worthwhile. Now that’s acting! As the aging glamour cat Grizabella, Hudson nearly busts a lung over-emoting on the show’s only memorable song, “Memory.” To hear this musical-theater standard done glorious, haunting justice, listen to Betty Buckley’s take on the tune — she won a Tony award for playing the part in the Broadway version. Her immortal version of the tune actually does stick in the, well, memory.

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The rest you will definitely want to banish to oblivion. It falls to genius Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler to adapt Gillian Lynne’s stage dances for the screen. His work may be impressive, but you’d never know it from the manic way Hooper keeps cutting from long shots to medium shots to close-ups so that the eye can never appreciate the simple beauty of a full body in graceful motion.

To give narrative shape to a show that has none, the director and his co-writer Lee Hall have added a new character: She’s Victoria, played by ballerina Francesca Hayward as our guide to various cat habitats from Trafalgar Square to a railroad track. Lloyd Webber has also included a new song, “Beautiful Ghosts,” shunning existing verses from Eliot for another poetical T.S. (think “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off”). The song, meant to enhance “Memory” and perhaps improve on it, fails in both cases. Sorry, Ms. Swift.

And so we’re left with a movie in which assorted stars step up to do their big number and vanish. There’s Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots, dancing with cockroaches. And there’s James Corden , hamming it to the hilt and beyond as Bustopher Jones, the gluttonous cat. And look! It’s Jason Derulo as the self-admiring Rum Tum Tugger. The lesser known Laurie Davidson plays the magical Mr. Mistoffelees and his big number is actually — wait for it — passable. The moment is fleeting.

Let the sheer grinding monotony of Cats stand as a measuring stick for future cinematic takes on Broadway musicals that hope to match its unparalleled, bottom-feeding dreadfulness. In his prize-winning Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner wrote a scene in which the rat-bastard lawyer Roy Cohn is on the phone sucking up to a client who wants tickets to a Broadway smash. When the caller says, “ Cats, ” Cohn sticks his fingers down his throat and mock vomits. Look for that gesture to be repeated by all who must endure this hellish fiasco of a film version. This disaster of a movie shouldn’t happen to a dog.

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The movie Cats doesn’t even know what the musical Cats is about

Cats is a case study in how not to adapt a musical.

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In an alternate universe, the new movie adaptation of Cats , the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber dance musical about cats, could have been a glorious holiday gift to the world. I’ve written a lot this year about how weird Cats is , and believe me, Cats , a story in which lots of cats introduce themselves and then one of them goes to cat heaven, is inherently weird . But there’s a vibrant, fun spark that runs through the musical’s threadbare plot — after all, it’s based on a book of children’s poems by T.S. Eliot — and despite the public’s generally baffled reaction to this movie’s existence, Cats had the potential to be joyous and light.

But it also had the potential to be a giant embarrassment, and I was wary that Cats wouldn’t be able to overcome either its own inherent quirkiness or the penchant of its director, Tom Hooper, to obliterate any emotional ebb and flow in his films and ratchet the pathos up to 11 at all times. His previous musical adaptation, 2012’s Les Misérables , was Oscar-nominated but also critically lambasted thanks to Hooper’s frequent misuse of fundamental filmmaking techniques, like close-ups and camera angles. As a fan of the stage musical’s mix of spectacle and compelling human drama, I also felt like he obliterated most of the musical’s emotional and scenic appeal.

So I was not optimistic. But I found it promising that Hooper was already a big Cats fan; plus, he had the assistance of Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, who also choreographed the recent Cats revival on Broadway, as well as Lloyd Webber himself. Maybe this would all go well.

Friends, it did not go well.

Some elements of Cats almost work. The set looks terrific, even though the scale is nonsensically inconsistent. The dancing is wonderful — when the camera manages to sit still long enough to showcase it. The music is essentially unchanged, and I happen to like the new song . It’s got its share of tongue-in-cheek levity, my particular favorite being the moment Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy solemnly instructs us, the audience, to address our cats thusly: “O, Cat.” One musical sequence in particular came really close, for me, to capturing Cats ’ effervescent whimsy.

But Hooper makes baffling directorial decisions at every turn. His staging misses key opportunities to bring the onscreen action in line with our expectations and especially with the music. This is a crucial point of objection, because Cats is primarily about the music and not much else. But Hooper’s film far too frequently disconnects its audience from its musical score by making choices that undercut or distract from what the music is doing. And that contributes to the overall disjointed, confusing effect Cats leaves us with.

Here’s a brief breakdown of the ways Cats maladapts its source material. (Some minor Cats spoilers follow.)

When the music of Cats is at its most happy and danceable, Cats the movie shows us lots of other stuff that is not a bunch of happy dancing cats

Embedded above is the discombobulating, jarring, trippy overture to Cats. There’s a lot of discordant synthesizer noise at first that builds up, rather brilliantly, I think, to the introduction of Cats ’ main theme at 1:11 — the Jellicle cats theme. You can hear this very clearly in the orchestration: The single melody takes over from all the bombastic orchestral noise, the bottom drops out completely, and the only thing that’s left is this slinky, delightfully feline melody.

What do you picture in your mind when you hear these soaring notes, my fellow travelers? Do you see, maybe, a row of curious, dizzying, daring cats venturing forth beneath an expansive London night? Or, perhaps, a single solitary cat leaping into the frame with all of the joy and majesty and agility that only a cat — or a human pretending to be a cat — could bring to this kind of bobbing, weaving melodic line?

Or do you see the visceral thump of a cat’s helpless body as it bounces off an alley step after being abandoned by its owner?

Guess which option Tom “ both feet in the bucket of cement ” Hooper got excited about? If you prayed for the former, you are, sadly, wrong.

This is how Cats , the movie, opens — with a cat in a bag being physically abused in time to this music . What about this music screams “throw a cat down a bunch of steps at the climax,” Tom Hooper? Who hurt you?! A dramatic moment like this could have been an effective way to open the film, but instead it has a fundamentally discordant effect. Which emotion are we supposed to be experiencing? The one connected to what we’re seeing — a pet being brutally abandoned — or the one connected to what we’re hearing, which is a jaunty musical theme meant to convey the essence of a cat’s mystery and inscrutability?

Again and again, Hooper shoves stuff at us visually that has nothing to do with what we’re hearing. The staging seems to ignore the dictates of the music to an infuriating degree; the camera often zooms in and out for inexplicable reasons and follows cats around the edges of the looming set while other stuff fills the background. It’s difficult to get a handle, visually, on where we’re supposed to be focused.

This spatial confusion meant that there were several times in which the film suddenly introduces us to major characters, only to be met with laughter by the audience at my screening. In a stage musical, character entrances should always be seeded dramatically with proper blocking, lighting, and musical cues — something a film can and should approximate, instead of just randomly cutting to someone we’ve never seen before. When something as simple as a character entrance is met with ridicule for being so abrupt and inexplicable, there is a serious, intrinsic problem with your movie musical.

Throughout this unfocused staging, the ensemble dancing that would ideally take precedent — you know, the thing you’re here to see, dancing cats — is frequently happening way off in the background. It’s maddening! In the 2016 Broadway revival, Blankenbuehler’s choreography made ample room for large ensemble numbers, which suggests this paucity of ensemble dancing lies squarely at Hooper’s feet. Particularly in the Jellicle Ball, which is supposed to be the big dancing cats scene, the majority of the number is now allotted to individual cats having random solo dance-offs. We don’t care about these individual dance-offs, though, because we know next to nothing about these individual cats. We just came for lots of cats dancing together! Give us lots of wide, full-body shots of rows of dancing cats, Tom Hooper! JUST GIVE US THE DANCING CATS!

You know — like this:

It introduces lots of new stuff, but the new stuff just makes Cats more confusing, not less

You might not think it possible that Cats the musical could become more baffling, given the addition of new contextual material to its random and barely there plot. But you would be so, so wrong.

For instance: The movie starts with our abused and abandoned cat, Victoria (Francesca Hayward), being dumped on the street by her former owners and then immediately inducted into the ineffable world of Jellicle-ness. There’s not a moment’s pause between these events. She doesn’t even get a moment to be sad! It’s just thump-bounce-thump, welp, here’s your new life, kid. This isn’t just bad pacing, it’s a muddled delineation of exposition. The movie then goes one step further and dramatically presents the idea that Victoria needs to learn her own secret Jellicle name. It stands to reason that this development means Victoria’s narrative will end with her finding out what that name is. Nope! Never happens.

Then there’s the backstory for Grizabella, Jennifer Hudson’s once-glamorous dance cat who’s now, erm, a fallen cat prostitute. (I told you, Cats is weird.) The details regarding Grizabella’s journey from celebrated performer to sex worker have never been clear in any version — but in the film, they’re made even more bizarre. That’s because another cat, Macavity (Idris Elba), is now, somehow, her pimp and a catnip pusher . So instead of just having to accept cat sex workers, we have to accept an entire feline underground of sex and drug trafficking.

Was this more necessary to helping us understand Cats than, for example, actually showing us some of the fabulous scenes Gus performed in his acting heyday? While we’re at it, did we really need an extended sequence of Rebel Wilson’s Jennyanydots eating cockroaches? And why on earth was she wearing a whole fake catsuit over her actual cat body; did her schtick as a cat who’s mostly active at night really necessitate cosplaying as ... a larger version of herself? Why did some scenes take every lyric literally, while others ignored the lyrics altogether? Why is it that every time Jennifer Hudson shows up, it feels like a completely different movie just walked onto the set and tried to tell you its melodramatic sob story when you just came out for some dancing? What is up with that random leg lift Deuteronomy does?! Is she horny for Gus?! And did we need to see Judi Dench being horny for Ian McKellan?!

I could live with one or two of these things being presented as part of the ineffable mystery of Cats , with no resolution sought or needed. But when every scene presents us with a pile of these endless bafflements, it becomes a giant, inexplicable mess.

With considerably less literalism, more attention given to the spirit of Cats , plenty of wider camera angles allowing the dancing to be the main focus as it always should have been, and clearer direction, this could have been a sincere pleasure. Instead, Tom Hooper has created a clusterfuck that will spawn an instantly ironic, mocking cult following.

I know this version of Cats had this squandered potential somewhere in its feline soul because of the one moment that somehow manages, despite everything, to be absolutely charming. That number, of all things, is “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat,” the random train song that features the world’s most extra time signature (13/8, my god!) and one of Cats ’ most forgettable characters. But in the movie, there’s a minor miracle: After a killer tap-dance break from Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae), we’re treated to a glorious wide shot showing a line of cats dancing under the sky over the River Thames. And just like that, Cats suddenly becomes magical. It’s a glimpse of another movie altogether — one that treats its story like a poetic child’s dream of a cat’s life, as T.S. Eliot originally intended, instead of this film’s mostly heavy-handed, stone-cold, somber approach.

So here’s my compromise. I’m just going to pretend that Macavity, the drug-pushing magical pimp, snuck onto the set of Cats and steadily vanquished all the sequences of that other, better film to the far realm of Growltiger’s pirate ship. I’m going to pretend that Skimbleshanks was the only sequence from that other, better film that managed to escape and find its way to us. I will hold that other film-that-could-have-been close to my heart and hope this inferior, imposter version of Cats hasn’t soured us too badly on movie musicals.

And when people ask me if I liked Cats , I will clutch my teal-sequined Cats premiere headband and say : Look — a new day has begun.

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Looking Back at New York ’s Positive 1982 Review of Cats

To commemorate the forthcoming release of Cats, we present the uncharacteristically positive, pun-filled review from John Simon that  New York  Magazine ran after the premiere of the Broadway production, in the issue of October 18, 1982.

If you like lavishness, if you like opulence, if you like kitty-literature at its grandest, Cats is surely your thing. The moment you enter the Winter Garden, you are transported into a world of junk sculpture by the cubic yard under a dome of many-colored stars that glitter on and off, viridescent cat’s eyes emblazoned on the dark, a Spielbergian flying saucer of colored lights rising slowly above the stage, a semi-abstract townscape backdrop featuring a huge (and soon to be revealed as Jellicle) moon, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s brashly sassy overture pouring at you from an invisible orchestra, and from every part of the theater (high and low) cats, cats, cats scampering, scurrying, scrabbling, and slithering across the auditorium and onto the stage (though there is scarcely a difference between those two areas, the whole world being a catwalk).

Somewhere between $5 million and $7 million (we hear) has been spent on creating this ambience that can vie with the Place de la Bastille on July 14 and the carnival in Rio, and, presto magico, the fur is flying. As you know, the words are from the verse of T.S. Eliot, with some additions by two lesser poets, Trevor Nunn, the show’s director, and Richard Stilgoe. As you also know, these are mostly Eliot’s Practical Cats poems, slight but endearing, plus a few similarly whimsical pieces from the Nachlass, and the already famous “Memory,” concocted from various early poems with some questionable additives. But Nunn, Lloyd Webber, and the rest have molded this material into a semblance of a plot full of Christian esc(h)atology as it might have been preached in the catacombs.

The show has apparently gained in grandeur since its London version, but it has lost one thing: the English accents. That old Tom from St. Louis always strove to out-British the British, and these verses fitted themselves to the British scene and the British tongue. They are somehow less funny with genuine American or fake British accents, though, with one or two exceptions, the New York cast, even when dancing up a cataclysm, manage to enunciate Old Possum’s verses with exemplary elocution, and Lloyd Webber and David Cullen have toned down the orchestrations so as not to drown out the words.

And what of the tunes? In his usual fashion, Lloyd Webber has contrived melodies that vary from the catchy to the merely serviceable, from the vaguely Puccinian to the less categorizably derivative, but very much — including even the mercilessly milked hit, “Memory” — purrloined. Never have I had such a yen to hire a private tune detective to track down the provenance of these songs, but mongrels though they be, they manage to work as a score. They blend in with John Napier’s splendid scenery and costumes, Gillian Lynne’s unspectacular but adequate choreography (particularly as executed by some lightsome, high-flying dancers), David Hersey’s endlessly imaginative and show-stopping lighting, and Trevor Nunn’s canny and effervescent direction into a delightful albeit trivial Gesant almost kunstwerk.

You will enjoy scenic effects to elate you, stage (and auditorium) movement to keep your eyeballs rolling every which way, talented players galore to thrill you (only one obnoxious performance, by Wendy Edmead), and sundry cunning devices to keep you eagerly expectant, with your expectations almost always astonishingly gratified. But there is, finally, too much dazzlement. As (in a chorus from “The Rock”) Eliot himself said: “In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of the light.” Too much insubstantial smart-aleckiness, too much costly gimcrackery, too many sequined inventions and spangled conceits, and all those orgasms of light all around us — for the first time in my life I found myself agreeing with Jerzy Grotowski’s notion of a “poor theater.” As on certain jukeboxes of yore you could buy three minutes of silence, I yearned to purchase a square foot of ungimmicked-up austerity.

Cats, Sheridan Morley has written, “is about the possibilities of theater,” and with such a caressingly, insinuatingly, ferally feline cast, the pussybilities, at any rate, are limitless. I must single out as my particular favorites Donna King, Harry Groener, Bonnie Simmons, and Stephen Hanan, though there are at least half a dozen others who are scarcely behind them. Betty Buckley, as the aging beauty Grizabella, keeps the pathos within bounds and sings “Memory” (damn it, where was that tune lifted from, anyway?) with commendably understated wistfulness. And Ken Page, as Old Deuteronomy (the song about him is the best in the score), manages to be as massive as Blake’s God and is nicely balanced by Timothy Scott’s winsomely whirling devil of a Mr. Mistoffelees (consistently misspelled in the program).

There is something for everyone — even dog lovers — in Cats : a kind of whiskered Disneyland full of sound and furry. You may justly feel that it is slight and overblown, that it is wasteful (the money spent on it could have kept all the starving cats of China in heavy cream for a century or two) and terribly arch, but you cannot help experiencing surges of childish jubilance, as cleverness after sleek cleverness rubs against your shins.

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Johnny Oleksinski

‘cats’ review: movie musical is a total disaster.

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Please wipe this movie from my “Memory.”

That would be “Cats,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit Broadway musical-turned-screen-litter box. The film has been a source of freak-show fascination all year long, from the cuckoo casting announcements — Judi Dench and Taylor Swift! — to the creepy CGI fur . But weirdness isn’t the issue here. “Cats,” which is based on T.S. Eliot’s poetry collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” ran on Broadway successfully for 18 years, and nobody ever went in expecting something traditional.

Director Tom Hooper’s movie is a huge failure because he’s completely abandoned the fundamentals of what made “Cats” a terrific show: sublime music, captivating dance and an intoxicating atmosphere. Instead, the director chooses to shake the camera around as though he can’t find his footing, uses dreadful CGI-human hybrids that look worse than makeup and needlessly buttresses the plot with exposition.

Yeah, Tom, let’s really focus on the plot of “Cats.”

Woefully watch as Hooper and writer Lee Hall throw in a frame story in which a kitten, Victoria (Francesca Hayward) , is abandoned in an alleyway — Merry Christmas! — and gets inaugurated into the Jellicle tribe. In case the audience gets lost during what’s essentially a song contest, they include an explainer from Robbie Fairchild’s Munkustrap: “Come see a cat who is competing to be the Jellicle choice!” To give Idris Elba more to do, his villainous Macavity now skulks around catnapping all the film’s A-list stars, abandoning them on a barge in the Thames. (I suspect this is also because the studio couldn’t get James Corden, Jason Derulo and Rebel Wilson to do the ensemble dances.)

Hooper, who also wrecked “Les Misérables” with his indulgences, brings back what’s become his signature: live singing. The tracks are not prerecorded to guarantee the actors sound, you know, good, but rather are sung au naturel as the scene is being filmed. Remember Anne Hathaway’s weepy haircut in “Miz”? Well, the actors in “Cats” — save for Swift as Bombalurina and Jason Derulo as the Rum Tum Tugger — are barely passable, with wobbly voices that struggle to stand out or blend. Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson awkwardly sobs through the musical’s most famous song, “Memory,” and shockingly can’t comfortably hit the notes.

The script, such as it is, has been tinkered with by the filmmakers, and you don’t have to be a scholar to spot their schlock. For instance, I highly doubt Nobel Prize winner Eliot wrote such lines as “Do you think he just got neutered? Because those notes are high!” and “Oh no, look what the cat dragged in.”

A word about the dancing. Original choreographer Gillian Lynne died last year, but left an indelible mark with musicals such as “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.” Her choreography for this show was a perfect mix of animalism, ballet and modern movement. But much of it has been jettisoned for Andy Blankenbuehler’s (“Hamilton”) more organic street dancing. It’s not only a shame that Lynne’s famous work wasn’t immortalized on-screen, but Blankenbuehler’s new moves are a snooze. He turns “The Jellicle Ball” from a showstopper to a watch-checker.

Over the years, Lloyd Webber has had a string of film clunkers, including “Evita” (Madonna, ugh) and “Phantom of the Opera” (Gerard Butler, ugh). “Cats” and Hudson easily make the ugh list, if not the upcoming Oscar nominations. But there are three worthwhile aspects of this movie, all actors giving it everything they’ve got. They would be legends Dench and Ian McKellen, naturally, but also a little-known 27-year-old charmer named Laurie Davidson, who plays Mr. Mistoffelees.

In the first song of the musical, a tribe of felines sing, “Jellicles can and Jellicles do.” Hooper’s film prompts the question: Should they?

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