CATS

Directing: C-
Acting: C
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C+
Special Effects: D-
Music: B-

The trick to enjoying Cats—or at least, to almost enjoying it—is to be drinking while you watch it. A lot. This was what my friends and I did going in, and it really made a difference. Particularly for me, by comparison: the other two people I saw this movie with had two cocktails each. I, on the other hand, had two margaritas, to which I added an extra contraband shot of tequila each, and I then had a snack of tequila chocolates afterward. Clearly I was the smartest person in the room. That would include everyone who had been involved in the production of this movie.

But there’s another trick! If you want to be pleasantly surprised, by even the tiniest sliver of a measure, seriously lower your expectations. The one true defense that can be made of this film is that condensing it down to a two-and-a-half-minute trailer made it look a lot more horrifying than it really is, on the whole. The flip side of that is, it also made it look a lot less dull. Because let’s face it, particularly if you have never seen the famously record-length-running Broadway show on which it’s based (which itself was largely derided as just for clueless tourists), Cats is largely just a 110-minute exercise in tedium.

And yet, because of the rolling mass of negative press, we all left the movie saying it wasn’t quite as horrible as we thought it would be. We dodn’t hate it. It was just . . . dull. The second half less so, but who wants to have to sit first through an hour of confusing editing, unsettling CGI, and a script that makes no sense? It’s originally based on a 1939 collection of T.S. Elliot poems called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, written for his godchildren. In the play, the “Jellicle Cats” are all going to a “Jellicle Ball” where they will compete to be chosen to go to a place called the “Heaviside Layer” to be reincarnated. That’s basically the extent of any plotting, as most of the story just consists of songs that serve as introduction to many different Jellice Cat characters.

The music is entirely forgettable. “Memory” is the sole famous song from it, and while it is indeed the best performance in this film (by Jennifer Hudson), I found even that song forgettable. I could hardly make out the words, what with Hudson’s constant sniveling and the inexplicable choice to keep showing more snot on her lips than tears. Yuck. In a long tradition of adding an original song to a musical adaptation to qualify for Oscar contention, Taylor Swift shows up to co-write “Beautiful Ghosts” with original book writer Andrew Lloyd Weber. That turns out to be an apt song title, because the memory of it disappears as soon as the number is finished. (Swift, incidentally, shows up onscreen as one of the cats, not to sing that song—though she does sing a pop version of it over the end credits—but to sing “Macavity.”)

But of course, I must address the spectacularly misguided special effects. This, more than anything, makes you wonder how or why any of the people involved—which also includes the likes of Edris Elba, Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen, among others—thought a film adaptation of Cats was a good idea. At least, not with live action integrated with CGI in such a way, where fur and realistic-looking cat ears and tails were digitally grafted onto human bodies. Just filming a version of the stage play with people in the traditional cat leotard costumes and face paint would have made far more sense. That’s the only way you can imagine this impressing audiences, after all: to see incredibly fit bodies achieve the kind of dance moves you could never do on a stage. Not to see cat-leaps enhanced by digital effects, director Tom Hooper included apparently just because he could. Evidently he never stopped to think about whether he should.

And the thing is, it’s not even done well. This is the part that is the stuff of nightmares, the stuff that makes you imagine a bad trip after taking acid. Is that what the effects team did before they set about their work? The humanoid faces don’t even always match the herky-jerky movements of the bodies (apparently to evoke “cat movements,” not at all successfully) quite right, vaguely evoking a horribly evolved, digital version of the rudimentary animation from South Park. People complained as far back as the first trailer about the inconsistency of scale. I found myself thinking about that while watching the full movie, even thinking the scale was working a lot better than I expected. And then the number by and about “Skimbleshanks” The Railway Cat” first features all the cats atop railway tracks, on which they are way too small'; mid-sequence they suddenly appear inside a railway car, in which they are way too big. What kind of inter-dimensional horror show is this? The weirdest thing about Cats is that the effects could have been done so much better, but somehow they just got their visual priorities all mixed up.

There’s always also the inevitability of bias, and how that affects how you feel about something for which already have a particular expectation. With Cats, the bias works kind of backward: I liked it better than I expected to, only because I had such profoundly low expectations. What if I had gone into this movie cold, having no idea what I was walking to, having never seen the trailer or even heard about it? Realistically, I probably would have hated it. I was already literally thinking to myself, What the fuck? multiple times as it was, even going on four shots of tequila. This movie includes a dance sequence featuring tiny humanoid cockroaches, several of which get eaten by the cat played by Rebel Wilson, who gets several moments of “gags” that land with a thud. My favorite is when she makes a crack about whether one of the other cats had been neutered, even glancing at his crotch. And this is in a world where none of the “cats” have genitals at all, just finely furred humanoid and flat Ken Doll crotches.

A lot of the production design here is visually interesting, I guess, but that hardly makes up for much. The truth is, even factoring in a deliberately specific approach to make the experience more fun, Cats still qualifies as the worst movie I’ve seen all year.

Just for the record: that cat is not peeing. She’s just a ballerina.

Overall: C-