Midnight
As I’m leaving the cinema
Have I lost my memory?
Unfortunately no
The CGI, leaves me withered as I look at my feet
And the Joe begins to moan

Why are
The jellicle cats are all singing
Introducing why they need
To live all over again
Then Judi Dench picks the predictable cat to get a new life.
The credits role, I can leave then.

… And that’s the amount of effort I’m putting into that style, because frankly, such a film doesn’t deserve even that. My god it’s awful. The plot of the whole film can be summarised by this very advanced graphic.

It’s repetitive and soulless. The cats just sing about their lives where-ever they are (With one exception). The film feels stagnant and not immersive of being a film. Surely the director could have realised they’re not confined to a stage. Why not make it interesting? Change up the environment from boring dark London. Show the stage cat as a stage cat. Show the abandoned cat as a non-abandoned cat and their transition to where they are now. Don’t just drag the boring stage show onto the screen. It really is a bunch of poems and you really can’t tell them apart. As I said, I got bored and did want to leave, a feeling I rarely have. (I didn’t and wouldn’t. I just really wasn’t enjoying it.)

Now we’ve established that the film isn’t interesting, lets talk about the bit you’re interested in: The cats themselves. To put it nicely, they were horrible. It was humans wearing leotards with CGI fur. It took 15 minutes to accept their weirdness, before 100 minutes of mediocrity, however, at no point did I think these were cats. They were humans acting weird and some felt rather naked. The long haired/clothed cats were marginally more acceptable, but the short haired cats felt almost naked and awkward, especially Idris Elba’s cat when he removes his coat.

And when you see these humans rubbing faces like cats, you don’t think “Aww, what sweet cats”, you think “What the [removed expletive] are these people doing?”. When these cats are fawning over Jason Derulo, and he flashes from his coat it’s weird. you think “Why am I watching this? They are sexualising cats” When the cats go from prancing to a more street dance and forget they’re cats, it just loses the tonality. Although I’m not sure that’s a complaint, the tonality preceding these moments is hardly something to sing about (Not as if that will stop this cast though).

Said cast involves all of the Hollywood A-listers you can’t get enough of. Francesca Hayward, is an actual ballet dancer to her credit and her role is to smile along to everything. You wonder how much pain she’s in watching Rebel Wilson be funny by being fat (possibly the only joke in her arsenal) and hurting herself. She then has to watch Derulo attempt to be sexy cat. Then if her life can’t get any more painful, along comes James Bloody Corden, who is being funny by being fat (possibly the only joke in his arsenal) and hurting himself. The poor cat has already been through enough by the time Judy Dench attempts to squeeze out a song and probably wants to end all nine of her lives by the time that Ian McKellen makes Russel Crowe’s Les Miserables performance look like Pavarotti. Taylor Swift turns up for 5 minutes to try and get that Best Song Oscar. Elba turns up and does something, then we have a song about Mr Mistoffelees being magic which repeats about 20 times and we finally end in Jennifer Hudson blasting out Midnight, although this is about the second/third time she’s sang the same song, so any impact has been lost. When poor old Hayward feels some respite, Dench has to do one more singing and dancing number about how to treat cats and smile that Hayward has kept on must have caused her so much pain as we can see in her dead eyed. Frankly, she deserves that best actress Oscar now for being able to smile and pretending to give a damn for two hours through that dross.

Other than McKellen, most of the songs were in tune and the dancers were choreographed, although as the camera shot changed every second, this was very difficult to appreciate. The editing was primary school level and frankly the lighting was dull and not fun and mysterious like it could have been. I didn’t like this film very much.

Summary

And we all say, Oh well I never, was there ever, a film so bad I’ve seen in twenty nineteen?

Why does this film exist? The cats were horrible and the film was boring and lifeless. Don’t watch this out of curiosity and to have fun, because you won’t. It will just leave you checking your watch. [Grade: E]